Division 
Section 


^^^^> 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL'S  "PILLAR- 
PASSAGES"  "''      ' 

The  publication  by  Paul  W.  Schmiedel  in  1901  of  the 
article  "Gospels"  in  the  Encyclopaedia  Biblica  marks  (we 
do  not  say,  creates)  something  very  much  like  an  epoch  in 
the  history  of  the  criticism  of  the  Gospel-narratives.  For 
more  than  a  century — "from  Reimarus  to  Wrede" — "the 
quest  of  the  historical  Jesus"  has  been  pursued  with  un- 
flagging industry.  That  is  to  say,  the  energies  of  a  long 
line  of  brilliantly  endowed  scholars,  equipped  with  the  in- 
strument of  the  most  extensive  and  exact  erudition,  have 
been  exhausted  in  the  effort  to  discover  some  historical 
basis  for  the  "natural"  Jesus  which  their  philosophical  pre- 
suppositions compelled  them  to  assume  behind  the  super- 
natural Jesus  presented  in  the  Gospel-narratives.  "Ex- 
hausted" is  the  right  word  to  use  here.  For  precisely  what 
Schmiedel's  article  advises  us  of,  is  the  failure  of  this  long- 
continued  and  diligently  prosecuted  labor  to  reach  the  re- 
sults expected  of  it.  After  a  half-century  of  somewhat 
unmethodical  investigation,  Ferdinand  Christian  Baur,  in 
the  middle  of  the  last  century,  laid  down  the  reasonable 
rule  by  which  subsequent  research  has  been  governed: 
"criticism  of  documents  must  precede  criticism  of  ma- 
terial."^    But  the  subsequent  half-century  of  criticism  of 

^F.  C.  Baur,  Kritische  Untersuchungen  ilber  die  kanonischen 
Evangelien,  1847,  Introduction.  Strauss  had  proceeded  on  the  princi- 
ple that  a  history  which  contains  narratives  of  miracles  can  deserve 
no  credit.  Baur  raises  the  question  whether  this  is  not  a  rash  con- 
clusion;  whether  the  metaphysical  notion  of  the  miraculous  is  not 
too  abstract  a  category  to  be  made  the  test  of  the  entire  evangelical 
history;  whether,  in  a  word,  some  investigation  into  the  origin  of  the 
narratives  is  not  called  for  before  a  conclusion  is  drawn  against  their 
contents;  and  whether,  therefore,  Strauss  has  not  erred  in  making 
his  criticism  so  exclusively  a  criticism  of  the  history  to  the  neglect 
of  criticism  of  the  writings  (p.  46).  He  recognizes  a  certain  natural- 
ness in  Strauss'  procedure  in  the  state  of  the  documentary  criticism 
of  the  day.  But  he  concludes:  "The  fault  of  the  Straussian  work 
is  that  it  makes  the  Gospel  history  the  object  of  criticism  without 
first  attaining  a  solid  result  with  the  criticism  of  the  writings"  (p.  71  )• 


196  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

documents  has  issued  in  certainly  nothing  to  the  purpose, 
and,  Schmiedel  seems  half-inchned  to  declare,  nothing  solid 
at  all.  The  Synoptic  problem,  he  tells  us,  remains  as  vexed 
at  the  end  of  it  as  it  was  at  the  beginning.  Certain  im- 
mediate sources  of  the  Synoptics'  material  it  is,  of  course, 
easy  enough  to  discern  lying  behind  them,  and  these  are 
very  generally  recognized.  But  behind  them  in  turn 
stretches  a  vista  of  sources,  traveling  down  which  the  eye 
becomes  weary;  and  the  complications  which  result  when 
an  attempt  is  made  to  take  these  into  consideration  con- 
found the  most  promising  hypotheses.  "The  solution  of 
the  Synoptical  problem  which  appeared  after  so  much  toil 
to  have  been  brought  so  near,"  remarks  Schmiedel,  "seems 
suddenly  to  be  removed  again  to  an  immeasurable  dis- 
tance."2  'Tt  cannot  but  seem  unfortunate"  therefore,  he 
continues,  "that  the  decision  as  to  the  credibility  of  the 
Gospel-narratives  should  be  made  to  depend  upon  the  de- 
termination of  a  problem  so  difficult  and  perhaps  insoluble 
as  the  Synoptical  is."^  Consequently  he  proposes  a  return 
to  the  pre-Tiibingen  position  of  criticism  of  the  material 
independently  of  the  criticism  of  the  documents  in  which 
this  material  is  presented.  "It  would  accordingly  be  a 
very  important  gain,"  he  says,  "if  we  could  find  some  means 
of  making"  the  decision  as  to  the  credibility  of  the  Gospel- 
narratives  "in  some  measure  at  least  independent  of"  the 
determination  of  the  Synoptical  problem.^ 

The   procedure  which   Schmiedel   here   proposes   is   ob- 

"However  natural  and  in  a  sense  unavoidable  the  way  opened  up  by- 
Strauss  may  be,  it  nevertheless  remains  undeniable  that  it  is  from 
the  very  nature  of  the  case  impossible  to  reach  an  assured  result 
with  the  criticism  of  the  history,  so  long  as  the  criticism  of  the 
writings  is  so  wavering  and  uncertain"  (p.  72).  Cf.  Otto  Pfleiderer, 
The  Development  of  Theology  in  Germany  since  Kant,  1890,  p.  224  fF. 

'Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.   1868. 

^Ihid.,  col.  1872. 

*Ibid.,  col.  1872;  cf.  Protestantische  Monatschefte  x.  (1906),  p.  400: 
"They  [his  'pillar-passages']  provide  the  possibility  of  establishing 
very  essential  traits  of  the  life  of  Jesus  without  the  question  of  the 
origin  and  the  mutual  relations  of  the  first  three  Gospels  having  to 
be  solved." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         1 9/ 

viously  revolutionary;  so  revolutionary  that  it  marks,  as 
we  say,  something  very  like  an  epoch  in  the  history  of 
the  criticism  of  the  Gospel-narratives.  It  is  an  express  re- 
turn to  the  methods  of  Strauss  as  opposed  to  the  more 
scientific  methods  validated  once  for  all  by  Baur  as  against 
Strauss ;  and  in  returning  to  Strauss'  methods  it  returns  in 
a  very  curious  way  to  Strauss'  exact  standpoint  of  un- 
reasoned scepticism  with  respect  to  the  Gospel-narratives. 
What  it  particularly  concerns  us  here  to  emphasize,  how- 
ever, is  that  it  registers  the  failure  of  "literary  criticism" 
of  the  Gospels  as  prosecuted  during  the  last  half -century, 
either,  as  Schmiedel  intimates,  to  accomplish  anything  of 
importance,  or,  in  any  event,  to  accomplish  anything  to  the 
purpose.  There  are  many,  no  doubt,  who  will  disown 
Schmiedel's  low  estimate  of  the  formal  results  of  Synop- 
tical criticism.  But  no  well-informed  person  will  care  to 
deny  that  for  the  ultimate  purpose  for  which  this  criticism 
has  been  invoked  its  failure  has  been  complete.  No  stra- 
tum of  tradition  has  been  reached  by  it  in  which  the  por- 
trait of  Jesus  differs  in  any  essential  respect  from  that 
presented  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels.  If  the  writers  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  were  (in  Schmiedel's  phrase^)  "worship- 
pers of  Jesus,"  no  less  were  those  who  formed  and  trans- 
mitted to  them  the  tradition  on  which  they  ultimately  rest 
(also  in  Schmiedel's  phrase^)  "worshippers  of  Jesus."  As 
we  go  back,  and  ever  farther  back,  to  the  very  beginnings 


'  This  is  the  term  employed  in  the  English  of  the  Encyclopaedia 
Biblica  (e.g.  col.  1872),  the  Preface  which  Schmiedel  contributed  to 
Arno  Neumann's  Jesus  (e.g.  pp.  ix.,  xviii.),  and  his  lecture  on  Jesus 
in  Modern  Criticism  (e.g.  p.  16)  alike;  and  as  all  these  discussions 
owe  their  English  clothing  to  friends  of  Schmiedel,  working  under 
his  eye,  we  should  perhaps  permit  the  term  to  stand.  The  German 
term  which  is  rendered  (Verehrung,  Verehrer)  we  should  not  sup- 
pose necessarily  expressed  so  specific  a  notion. 

•Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  ix. :  "The  Gospels  are,  all  of  them,  the 
work  of  worshippers  of  Jesus,  and  their  contents  have  been  handed 
down  through  the  channel  of  tradition  in  like  manner  by  His  wor- 
shippers"; p.  xviii:  "This  tradition  was  itself  really  handed  down  by 
worshippers  of  Jesus."  So  also  W.  Heitmuller,  in  Schiele  and  Zschar- 
nack's  Die  Religion,  etc.,  III.  pp.  357-359- 


198  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

of  any  tradition  to  which  literary  criticism  can  penetrate, 
the  purely  human  Jesus  who  is  assumed  to  lie  behind  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels  still  continually  eludes  us.  Accord- 
ingly a  Pfleiderer  frankly  despairs  of  ever  recovering 
Him,''  and  a  Wellhausen  leaves  on  his  readers  a  strong 
impression  that  his  drastic  criticism  must  land  us  ulti- 
mately in  the  same  desperation.^  Schmiedel's  counsel  is,  in 
these  circumstances,  to  reverse  the  established  method  of 
the  last  half-century,  and,  abandoning  the  criticism  of  docu- 
ments which  no  longer  seems  hopeful,  to  seek  to  break  a 
way  to  the  assumed  purely  human  Jesus  by  means  of  im- 
mediate criticism  of  the  historical  material  itself.  And  he 
thinks  he  can  blaze  out  the  road  directly  to  the  desired  goal. 
It  ought  to  be  noted  in  passing  that  Schmiedel  sometimes 
speaks  as  if  he  were  not  prepared  to  admit  that  the  attain- 
ment of  the  purely  human  Jesus,  so  long  sought  in  vain  by 
literary  criticism,  were  the  determining  motive  of  the 
change  of  procedure  which  he  suggests.®  He  everywhere 
speaks,  indeed,  as  if  the  critical  principle  which  he  invokes 
were  quite  indifferent  to  this  issue.  He  even  asserts  ex- 
plicitly :  "In  reality,  my  foundation-texts  were  in  no  sense 
sought  out  by  me  for  any  purpose  whatever;  they  thrust 
themselves  upon  me  in  virtue  of  one  feature,  and  one  fea- 
ture only:  the  impossibility  of  their  having  been  invented, 
and  their  consequent  credibility."^^  Except  in  a  purely 
formal  sense,  however,  this  is  manifestly  absurd.  It  is 
its  superhuman  Jesus  with  His  nimbus  of  the  supernatural 
which  is  the  sole  scandalon  of  the  Synoptic  narrative,  apart 
from  which  that  narrative  would  be  acknowledged  by  all 
as  exceptionally  trustworthy.  "Precisely  this,"  remarks 
Albert  Schweitzer  justly,  "is  the  characteristic  of  the  liter- 


""  Cf.     The  Princeton  Theological  Review  iv  (1906),  pp.  121-124. 

'Cf.  H.  Weinel,  1st  das  "liberale"  Jesus  widerlegt?  1910,  p.  20: 
"And  even  now  if  Wrede  and  Wellhausen  do  not  really  mean  that 
Jesus  is  a  wholly  imaginary  figure,  yet  the  judgment  to  which  their 
work  leads  runs:  'Jesus  is  for  us  unknowable  (unerkennbar)'." 

*  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881. 

"  Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  xxi. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  1 99 

ature  of  the  Life  of  Jesus  at  the  opening  of  the  twentieth 
century,' — that  the  purely  historical,  even  in  the  productions 
of  historical,  scientific,  professional  theology,  retires  behind 
the  interest  in  the  world-view.""  Schmiedel  does  not 
separate  from  his  companions  in  this.  He  comes  to  the 
criticism  of  the  Gospel-narratives  with  a  definite  world- 
view  as  the  primary  presupposition  of  his  work;  and  this 
world-view  is  the  current  anti-supernaturalistic  one.  There 
is  nothing  of  which  he  is  surer  than  that  Jesus  was  merely 
a  man;^2  unless  it  be  that  miracles  in  general  do  not  hap- 
pen.^^  The  only  reason  why  he  rejects  out  of  hand  the 
Jesus  given  him  by  the  Synoptic  narratives  is  that  the 
Jesus  given  him  by  the  Synoptic  narratives  is  not  a  mere 
man.  And  the  precise  thing  he  sets  himself  to  look  for  be- 
hind the  Synoptic  narratives  is  evidence  of  some  kind  that 
the  real  Jesus  was,  despite  the  constant  testimony  of  the 
tradition,  nevertheless  merely  man.  "What,"  he  asks,  "are 
the  portions  of  the  Gospels  so  persistently  objected  to?" 
And  he  replies :     "We  find  that  they  are,  to  say  all  in  a 


"  Quest  of  the  Historical  Jesus,  p.  322. 

"  Hibbert  Journal  Supplement :  Jesus  or  Christ?  1909,  p.  601 :  "Since 
the  divine  and  human  nature  cannot  be  united  in  Jesus,  and  since 
Jesus  was  undoubtedly  man,  we  have  simply  to  regard  His  human 
nature  as  given."  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  1907,  p.  86:  "My  re- 
ligion, moreover,  does  not  require  me  to  find  in  Jesus  an  absolutely 
perfect  model,  and  it  would  not  trouble  me  if  I  found  another  person 
who  excelled  Him,  as  indeed,  in  certain  respects  some  have  already 
done.  Convinced  as  I  am  that  He  was  human,  if  another  should  have 
more  to  offer  me  than  He  had,  I  should  consider  this  simply  another 
instance  of  God's  bounty  and  favour."  Ibid.,  p.  6:  "It  is  no  less 
pleasant  to  note  at  the  same  time  that  the  person  of  Jesus  is  being 
explained  in  a  more  and  more  definitely  human  way  by  all  theological 
parties,  and  in  a  more  or  less  human  way  even  by  ultra-conservatives." 
Cf.  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881 ;  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  24. 

"  "It  would  be  clearly  wrong,"  he  indeed  declares  (Encyclopaedia 
Biblica,  col.  1876),  "in  an  investigation  such  as  the  present,  to  start 
from  any  such  postulate  or  axiom  as  that  'miracles'  are  impossible;" 
but  he  is  soon  found  arguing  that  "even  one  strongly  predisposed  to 
believe  in  miracles  would  find  it  difficult  to  accept  a  narrative,"  like 
that  of  Lk.  xxiii.  44  ff  because  it  alleges  a  darkening  of  the  sun  at  a 
time  of  the  month  when  eclipses  do  not  happen — that  is  because  if  it 
happened  at  all  it  must  have  been  by  miracle. 


200  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

word,  those  in  which  Jesus  appears  as  a  Divine  Being, 
whether  in  virtue  of  what  He  says,  or  in  virtue  of  what 
He  does."^^  There  is  no  other  reason  why  the  portrait  of 
Jesus  given  by  the  Synoptics  should  be  "objected  to."  And 
so  firmly  set  is  Schmiedel's  reluctance  to  the  admission  of 
the  possibility  of  such  a  Jesus  that  he  even  goes  the  length 
of  declaring  that  were  this  representation  consistent  and 
unbroken,  he,  for  his  part  might  find  it  impossible  to  defend 
the  actual  existence  of  any  Jesus  at  all.^^  Either  a  purely 
human  Jesus  or  no  Jesus  at  all  is  the  only  alternative  that 
he  will  admit,  prior  to  entering  into  any  critical  inquiry  into 
the  evidence;  and  the  sole  object  of  his  criticism  is  to  dis- 
cover some  evidence  of  the  existence  of  a  purely  human 
Jesus.  The  precise  significance  of  his  proposed  revolution 
in  critical  procedure,  therefore,  is  that  it  openly  recognizes 
that  literary  criticism  has  failed  to  discover  any  evidence 
of  the  existence  of  a  purely  human  Jesus  behind  the  super- 
human Jesus  of  the  Synoptic  narratives,  and  suggests  that 
another  and  more  direct  way  be  therefore  tried  to  reach  the 
desired  end. 

Schmiedel's  criticism  brings  us,  then,  to  a  parting  of 
the  ways.  Not  only  are  we  justified,  therefore,  in  giving 
it  an  attention  which  in  itself  it  might  not  seem  to  merit. 
It  is  in  a  sense  required  of  us  to  subject  it  to  a  sufficiently 
careful  scrutiny  to  assure  us  that  we  understand  exactly 
what  he  proposes,  and  also,  if  possible,  exactly  what  the 
significance  of  this  proposal  is. 

So  far  as  we  are  informed  Schmiedel  first  propounded 
his  new  critical  method  in  the  article  "Gospels"  which  was 
published  in  the  second  volume  of  the  Encyclopaedia  Bib- 
lica  in  1901.  The  commendation  of  it  to  a  German  public 
seems  in  the  first  instance  to  have  been  made  by  expositions 

"  Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  ix. 

^'^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881 :  "If  passages  of  this  kind  were 
wholly  wanting  in  them,  it  would  be  impossible  to  prove  to  a  skeptic 
that  any  historical  value  whatever  was  to  be  assigned  to  the  gospels; 
he  would  be  in  a  position  to  declare  the  picture  of  Jesus  contained 
in  them  to  be  purely  a  work  of  phantasy,  and  would  remove  the 
person  of  Jesus  from  the  field  of  history." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  201 

of  it  given  by  his  brother,  Otto  Schmiedel,  in  1902^^  and 
by  his  pupil,  Arno  Neumann,  in  1904.^^  It  was  apparently 
not  until  1906  that  Schmiedel  himself  laid  it  before  his 
countrymen,  early  in  that  year  somewhat  incidentally  in  a 
tractate  on  the  Gospel  of  John  as  compared  with  the  Synop- 
tics,^^ and  later  more  at  length  in  a  lecture  on  the  Person 
of  Jesus  in  modern  controversy,  which  was  delivered  at  the 
meeting  of  the  Swiss  Association  for  Free  Christianity  on 
June  15,  1906,  and  published  in  the  July  number  of  the 
Protestantische  Monafshefte,  and  afterwards  separately.^® 
In  the  same  year  he  returned  to  its  exposition  and  defence 
in  English  in  a  preface  which  he  wrote  for  the  English 
translation  of  Neumann's  Jesiis;-^  and  in  the  following 
year  there  was  issued  an  English  translation  of  his  Swiss 
lecture.^^  These  publications  constitute  our  sources  of  in- 
formation with  respect  to  the  proposal  we  are  to  examine.^^ 


"£>tV  Hauptprobleme  der  Leben-Jesu-Forschung,  von  Otto  Schmie- 
del, 1902,  §  vi.,  Auswahl  absolut  glaubwiirdiger  Stellen,  pp.  39-41. 
The  second  edition,  1906,  repeats  this  section  without  change,  pp.  46-48. 

"Jesus,  wer  er  geschichtlich  war,  von  Arno  Neumann,  1904,  Die 
Vorfrage,  §  5,  pp.  16-18.     English  Translation:    Jesus,  1906,  pp.  9-11. 

^  Das  vierte  EvangeKum  gegeniiber  den  drei  ersten,  von  Professor 
D.  P.  W.  Schmiedel,  Ziirich,  being  the  8th  and  loth  parts  of  the  first  series 
of  the  well-known  ReligionsgeschichtUche  Volksbiicher,  1906,  pp.  16- 
22,  31  f,  33,  81-83,  85-87. 

^Protestantische  Monatshefte,  x.  (1906),  7  pp.  257-282.  Die  Person 
Jesu  im  Streite  der  Meinungen  der  Gegenwart,  Vortrag  .  .  .  von  D. 
Paul  Wilh.  Schmiedel  .  .  .  Leipzig,  1906.  Also  in  an  edition  published 
at  Ziirich  [1906]  which  contains  also:  Erstes  Votum  von  J.  G. 
Hosang,  Dekan  in  Pontresina,  samt  Schlusswort  der  Referenten. 

^  Jesus.  By  Arno  Neumann.  Translated  by  Maurice  A.  Canney, 
M.A.  With  a  Preface  by  P.  W.  Schmiedel,  London :  Adam  and 
Charles  Black,  1906.     The  Preface  occupies  pp.  v.-xxviii. 

'^  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism.  A  lecture  by  Dr.  Paul  W.  Schmiedel, 
Professor  of  Theology  in  Zurich.  Translated  into  English  (by  per- 
mission of  the  publishers  of  the  Prot.  Monatshefte)  by  Maurice  A. 
Canney,  M.A.     London:    Adam  and  Charles  Black,  1907. 

^A  "Nachwort  iiber  die  'Grundsaulen'  eines  Lebens  Jesu"  in  reply 
to  an  article  in  the  same  number  (pp.  386-392)  by  Eduard  Hertlein 
of  Jena,  entitled,  "Neue  'Grundsaulen'  eines  'Lebens  Jesu'?"  was 
published  by  Schmiedel  in  the  number  of  the  Protestantische  Monats- 
hefte for  Nov.  1906   (x.  10,  pp.  393-400). 


202  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

In  its  primary  publication-^  Schmiedel  explains  his  sug- 
gestion, if  succinctly,  yet  with  sufificient  clearness.  Turning 
from  literary  to  historical  criticism,  the  investigator  finds,. 
he  remarks,  two  lines  of  procedure  open  to  him — a  negative 
and  a  positive  one.  He  must  on  the  one  hand,  "set  on  one 
side  everything  which  for  any  reason,  arising  either  from 
the  substance  or  from  considerations  of  literary  criticism, 
has  to  be  regarded  as  doubtful  or  wrong."  On  the  other 
hand,  "he  must  make  search  for  all  such  data,  as  from' 
the  nature  of  their  contents  cannot  possibly  on  any  account 
be  regarded  as  inventions."  Following  out  the  former  of 
these  lines  of  inquiry  with  respect  to  the  Synoptic  Gospels 
Schmiedel  points  out  a  number  of  matters  (including  their 
accounts  of  miraculous  occurrences)  in  which  he  considers 
them  clearly  untrustworthy.-^  With  this  negative  criti- 
cism we  are  not  for  the  moment  concerned.  We  only  note 
in  passing  that  it  is  sufficiently  drastic  to  lead  Schmiedel 
to  remark  at  the  close  of  the  sections  devoted  to  it,  "The 
foregoing  sections  may  have  sometimes  seemed  to  raise  a 
doubt,  whether  any  credible  elements  were  to  be  found  in 
the  Gospels  at  all."-^  The  method  of  the  positive  investiga- 
tion is  outlined  as  follows  -r^ 

"When  a  profane  historian  finds  before  him  a  historical  docu- 
ment which  testifies  to  the  worship  of  a  hero  unknown  to  other 
sources,  he  attaches  first  and  foremost  importance  to  those 
features  which  cannot  be  deduced  merely  from  the  fact  of  this 
worship,  and  he  does  so  on  the  simple  and  sufficient  ground 
that  they  would  not  be  found  in  this  source  unless  the  author 
had  met  with  them  as  fixed  data  of  tradition.  The  same  funda- 
mental principle  may  be  safely  applied  in  the  case  of  the  gospels, 
for  they  also  are  all  of  them  written  by  worshippers  of  Jesus. 
We  now  have  accordingly  the  advantage — which  cannot  be  ap- 
preciated too  highly — of  being  in  a  position  to  recognise  some- 
thing as  being  worthy  of  belief  even  without  being  able  to  say, 
or  even  being  called  on  to  inquire,  whether  it  comes  from 
original  Mk.,  from  logia,  or  from  oral  tradition,  or  from  any 
other  quarter  that  may  be  alleged.  The  relative  priority  be- 
comes a  matter  of  indifiference,  because  the  absolute  priority — 

'^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1872  fif. 
'^Ibid.,  col.  1873-1880. 
"^Ibid.,  col.  1881. 
'^Ibid.,  col.   1872. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  2O3 

that  is,  the  origin  in  real  tradition — is  certain.  In  such  points 
the  question  as  to  credibility  becomes  independent  of  the  synop- 
tical question.  Here  the  clearest  cases  are  those  in  which  only 
one  evangeUst,  or  two,  have  data  of  this  class,  and  the  second, 
or  third,  or  both,  are  found  to  have  taken  occasion  to  alter  these 
in  the  interests  of  the  reverence  due  to  Jesus. 

"If  we  discover  any  such  points — even  if  only  a  few — they 
guarantee  not  only  their  own  contents,  but  also  much  more. 
For  in  that  case  one  may  also  hold  as  credible  all  else  which 
agrees  in  character  with  these,  and  is  in  other  respects  not  open 
to  suspicion.  Indeed  the  thoroughly  disinterested  historian  must 
recognise  it  as  his  duty  to  investigate  the  grounds  for  this  so 
great  reverence  for  himself  which  Jesus  was  able  to  call  forth; 
and  he  will  then,  first  and  foremost,  find  himself  led  to  recognise 
as  true  the  two  great  facts  that  Jesus  had  compassion  for  the 
multitude  and  that  he  preached  with  power,  not  as  the  scribes 
(Mt.  ix.  36;  vii.  29)."" 


"The  meaning  of  these  last  sentences  is  practically  that,  having  by 
the  processes  of  criticism  outlined  in  the  preceding  paragraph  secured 
a  merely  human  Jesus,  Schmiedel  now  sets  himself  to  present  as 
high  a  conception  of  this  merely  human  Jesus  as  he  can  without  over- 
stepping the  bounds  of  His  mere  humanity.  Consequently  he  is  willing 
to  point  to  such  passages  as  Mt.  vii.  29;  Mk.  vi.  34;  Mt.  xi.  28  as 
"of  the  same  truthful  nature"  as  the  "pillar  passages,"  though  the 
principle  of  their  selection  is  now  the  opposite  one,  that  they  enhance 
the  character  of  Jesus  (Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  pp.  25-26).  He 
is  even  on  this  principle  prepared  to  run  directly  in  the  teeth  of  the 
principle  of  his  "pillar-passages."  Those  passages,  he  says,  have 
thrust  themselves  upon  him  because  the  statements  in  them  are  too 
inconsistent  with  the  reverence  in  which  Jesus  was  held  by  the  com- 
munity to  represent  their  view,  and  must  therefore  have  come  from 
an  earlier  tradition  which  is  true.  But  there  are  passages  which  in  his 
judgment  attribute  to  Jesus  teachings  which  he  refuses  to  believe  was 
genuinely  Jesus'  because  they  are  altogether  too  inconsistent  with 
reverence  for  Him.  There  is,  for  example,  the  parable  of  the  rich 
man  and  Lazarus,  in  which  (in  his  view)  mere  poverty  is  made  a 
virtue,  and  mere  riches  a  vice  (Lk.  xvi.  25).  There  is  the  parable 
of  the  unrighteous  steward  in  which  mere  relaxation  of  financial  claims 
without  any  consideration  of  the  rights  and  duties  involved,  is  made  a 
shining  virtue  (Lk.  xvi.  1-9).  Why  not  reason  that  these  are  ob- 
viously fragments  of  an  earlier  tradition  inconsistent  with  the  wor- 
ship in  which  Jesus  had  come  to  be  held,  and  demonstrate  to  us  that 
Jesus  was  an  "Ebionite,"  a  fanatical  leveler?  But  Schmiedel  draws 
back  and  remarks :  "It  should  be  obvious  that  Jesus  cannot  have  said 
such  things  as  these"  (Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  pp.  72-73),  arguing 
against  their  genuineness  after  a  fashion  which  sounds  very  strange 
on  his  lips,  and  raises  the  question  whether  he  himself  really  believes 
in  the  principle  of  his  "pillar-passages." 


204  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

Proceeding  after  this  fashion  Schmiedel  fixes  primarily 
on  five  passages  which  seem  to  him  to  meet  the  conditions 
laid  down;  that  is  to  say,  they  make  statements  which  are 
in  conflict  with  the  reverence  for  Jesus  that  pervades  the 
Gospels  and  therefore  could  not  have  been  invented  by  the 
authors  of  the  Gospels,  but  must  have  come  to  them  from 
earlier  fixed  tradition ;  and  they  are  preserved  in  their  crude 
contradiction  with  the  standpoint  of  the  evangelists,  ac- 
cordingly, only  by  one  or  two  of  them,  while  the  others, 
or  other,  of  them,  if  they  report  them  at  all,  modify  them 
into  harmony  with  their  standpoint  of  reverence.^^  These 
five  passages  are:  Mk.  x,  17  ft'  ('Why  callest  thou  me 
good?  None  is  good  save  God  only');  Mt.  xii.  31  f¥ 
(blasphemy  against  the  Son  of  Man  can  be  forgiven)  ;  Mk. 
iii.  21  (His  relations  held  Him  to  be  beside  Himself) ;  Mk. 
xiii.  32  ('Of  that  day  and  of  that  hour  knoweth  no  one, 
not  even  the  angels  in  heaven,  neither  the  Son  but  the 
Father');  Mk.  xv.  34,  Mt.  xxvii.  46  ('My  God,  my  God, 
why  hast  thou  forsaken  me?').  To  these  he  adds  four 
more  which  have  reference  to  Jesus'  power  to  work 
miracles,  viz. :  Mk.  viii.  12  (Jesus  declines  to  work  a 
sign)  ;  Mk.  vi.  5  ft  (Jesus  was  able  to  do  no  mighty  works 
in  Nazareth)  ;  Mk.  viii.  14-21  ('The  leaven  of  the  Pharisees 
and  of  Herod'  refers  not  to  bread  but  to  teaching)  ;  Mk. 
xi.  5,  Lk.  vii.  22  (the  signs  of  the  Messiah  are  only  figur- 
atively miraculous).  These  nine  passages  he  calls  "the 
foundation-pillars  for  a  really  scientific  life  of  Jesus."  In 
his  view,  they  prove,  on  the  one  hand,  that  "Jesus  really 
did  exist,  and  that  the  Gospels  contain  at  least  some  trust- 
worthy facts  concerning  Him," — a  matter  which,  he  seems 
to  suggest,  would  be  subject  to  legitimate  doubt  in  the  ab- 
sence of  such  passages;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  that  "in 
the  person  of  Jesus  we  have  to  do  with  a  completely  human 
being,  and  that  the  divine  is  to  be  sought  in  Him  only  in 
the  form  in  which  it  is  capable  of  being  found  in  a  man."^* 

'^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.   1881. 
''Ibid. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES"         2O5 

From  them  as  a  basis,  he  proposes  to  work  out,  admitting 
nothing  to  be  credible  which  is  not  accordant  with  the  non- 
miraculous,  purely  human,  Jesus  which  these  passages 
imply. 

The  principle  of  procedure  which  Schmiedel  invokes,  it 
will  be  seen,  he  represents  as  one  which  is  in  universal  use 
in  like  circumstances  among  profane  historians.  He  rep- 
resents it  as  altogether  independent  of  literary  criticism 
and  as  finding  its  chief  value  in  this  fact.  He  rep- 
resents it  further  as  yielding  results  which  may  be  confi- 
dently depended  upon.  And  he  represents  these  results  as 
totally  reversing  the  portrait  of  Jesus  presented  in  the  docu- 
ments subjected  to  this  critical  scrutiny,  substituting  for 
the  divine  Jesus  which  they  depict  a  purely  human  Jesus. 
All  this  will  become  clearer  as  we  attend  to  the  subsequent 
expositions  he  has  given  of  his  method; 

The  subject  is  introduced,  in  the  little  book  on  John,^*^ 
in  the  course  of  a  discussion  of  the  miracles  attributed  to 
our  Lord  by  John.  John,  it  is  remarked,  represents  our  Lord 
as  working  miracles  as  "signs;"  but  we  learn  from  Mk. 
viii.  11-13  that  Jesus  refused  to  give  a  "sign"  to  that  gen- 
eration. "And,"  continues  Schmiedel,  "  He  must  really 
have  made  this  declaration;  for  no  one  of  His  reporters 
would  have  invented  it,  since  they,  each  and  every  one  of 
them,  believed  that  Jesus  did  work  miracles  with  this  pur- 
pose."    Then  he  continues : 

"In  order  to  place  the  significance  of  such  passages  in  its 
full  light,  we  give  them  the  name  of  foundation-pillars  of  a 
really  scientific  life  of  Jesus.  Every  historical  investigator,  no 
matter  in  what  field  he  works,  follows  the  principles  to  hold  for 
true  in  the  first  instance,  in  any  account  which  testifies  to  rever- 
ence (Verehrung,  'worship')  for  its  hero,  that  which  runs  coun- 
ter to  this  reverence,  because  that  cannot  be  based  on  invention. 
Since  we  possess  a  plurality  of  Gospels  we  can  further  observe 
how  in  one  or  more  of  them  such  passages  are  in  part  trans- 
formed, in  part  wholly  omitted,  because  they  were  too  objection- 
able precisely  to  reverence  for  Jesus.  In  their  original  form  such 
passages  show,  therefore,  in  the  most  certain  way  how  Jesus  really 
thought  and  lived,  namely  after  a  fashion  which  we — with  all 

^  Pp.  16-17. 


206  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

recognition  that  there  was  something  divine  in  Him — must  call 
a  genuinely  human  one.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  only  such  pas- 
sages which  give  assurance  that  we  may,  at  least  in  some  degree, 
depend  upon  the  Gospels  in  which  they  occur,  that  is  to  say 
the  first  three  Gospels.  Were  they  wholly  lacking  in  them,  it 
would  be  difficult  to  withstand  the  allegation  that  the  Gospels 
everywhere  give  us  only  a  sacred  image  painted  on  a  gold  ground, 
and  we  could  not  at  all  know  what  kind  of  an  appearance  Jesus 
really  made,  or  indeed  perhaps  even  whether  He  ever  existed 
at  all.  The  'foundation-pillars'  upon  which,  along  with  the  one 
already  mentioned,  we  can  rely  in  order  to  obtain  a  right  idea 
of  the  miraculous  works  of  Jesus,  we  speak  of  at  pp.  3iflf,  and 
in  chapter  iii.,  paragraphs  i8  and  19;  and  of  the  remaining  ones 
which  are  of  importance  for  other  aspects  of  Jesus'  nature  at 
pp.  18  f,  19  f,  21,  22,  and  33. 

"It  is  self-evident  that  what  we  find  to  be  credible  in  the  Syn- 
optics is  in  no  wise  confined  to  these  nine  'foundation-pillars.' 
It  belongs  to  the  chief  tasks  of  an  historical  investigator,  from 
His  words  and  acts,  to  make  the  effect  (Erfolg)  which  a  great 
historical  figure  has  had  intelligible.  This  effect  in  Jesus'  case 
is,  however,  so  great  that  even  an  investigator  who  stands  en- 
tirely cool  in  His  presence  must  seek  out  and  accept  as  true 
everything  which  is  adapted  to  establish  His  greatness  and  to 
make  the  reverence  felt  for  Him  by  His  contemporaries  intel- 
ligible,— it  being  premised,  of  course,  that  it  does  not  contradict 
the  portrait  of  Jesus  obtained  from  the  'foundation-pillars,'  and 
also  does  not  otherwise  rouse  well-grounded  doubts." 

There  is  perhaps  observable  in  this  statement  a  certain 
heightening  of  what  was  more  cautiously  expressed  in  the 
initial  statement,  in  the  Encyclopaedia  Biblica.  There,  for 
example,  we  were  told  that  it  was  when  a  historian  found 
himself  before  a  unique  document  testifying  to  the  worship 
of  a  hero  unknown  to  other  sources  that  he  resorted  to 
this  method  of  investigating  the  credibility  of  his  otherwise 
uncontrollable  informant.  Here  all  this  qualification  falls 
away  and  it  is  spoken  of  as  if  this  were  a  universally  prac- 
tised method  in  all  historical  research.  The  general  untrust- 
worthiness  of  the  evangelical  portrait  of  Jesus  and  the  close- 
ness of  the  alternative  that  we  should  have  no  credible 
account  of  Jesus  and  perhaps  be  left  in  doubt  of  his  very 
existence  seems  also  to  be  somewhat  more  extremely  sug- 
gested. 

We  are  in  a  different  atmosphere  in  the  Preface  to  Arno 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  20/ 

Neumann's  Jesus.  Here  Schmiedel  is  defending  his  critical 
method  and  its  results  against  the  strictures  of  John  M. 
Robertson,  who  holds  that  Jesus  is  a  pure  myth  and  that 
therefore  the  Gospels  cannot  contain  any  credible  testimony 
to  His  existence.  Schmiedel  is  concerned  accordingly  to 
throw  into  emphasis  the  positive  side  of  his  method,  and 
to  make  plain  that  he  obtains  by  it  not  mere  probability 
but  certainty  as  to  Jesus — both  as  to  His  existence  and  as 
to  His  true  character.  He  concedes  that  the  Gospels  present 
the  appearance  of  altogether  untrustworthy  narratives,  and 
that  we  are,  therefore,  with  them  on  our  hands  as  our 
sources  of  knowledge  of  Jesus,  in  a  very  unfavorable  po- 
sition.    But  he  reasons  thus  :^^ 

"Yet  let  us  examine  a  little  more  closely.  What  are  the  por- 
tions of  the  Gospels  which  are  so  persistently  objected  to?  We 
find  that  they  are,  to  say  all  in  a  word,  those  in  which  Jesus 
appears  as  a  Divine  Being  whether  in  virtue  of  what  He  says 
or  in  virtue  of  what  He  does.  And  the  reason  why  exception 
is  taken  to  these  passages  may  be  stated  thus :  The  Gospels 
are,  all  together,  the  work  of  worshippers  of  Jesus,  and  their 
contents  have  been  handed  down  through  the  channel  of  tradi- 
tion in  like  manner  by  His  worshippers ;  the  portions  to  which 
exception  is  taken  are  open  to  the  suspicion  that  they  are  the 
outcome  of  these  feelings  of  devotion,  and  not  purely  objective 
renderings  of  the  facts  as  they  actually  occurred.  But  how, 
let  us  ask,  if  the  Gospels  also  contain  portions  which  are  abso- 
lutely free  from  any  suspicion  whatever  of  this  sort?  So  far 
as  the  difficulty  just  referred  to  is  concerned,  these  at  least  may 
be  historical.  May  be ;  yet  it  is  also  possible  that  they  may  not 
be;  plainly,  in  fact,  they  cannot  be  if  the  person  of  Jesus  is 
altogether  unhistorical.  For  example:  moral  precepts  which 
in  themselves  might  justify  no  suspicion  against  the  historical 
character  of  the  person  to  whom  they  are  attributed,  could  yet 
very  easily  be  put  into  the  mouth  of  a  purely  invented  and  in 
no  sense  historical  Jesus. 

"Thus  we  find  ourselves  still  left  in  the  unfavorable  position 
already  indicated — unless  peradventure,  we  should  be  able  to 
find  in  the  Gospels  some  passages  which  far  from  being  equally 
appropriate  alike  to  an  invented  and  to  a  historical  Jesus,  should 
be  wholly  impossible  in  the  former  case.  If  Jesus  is  an  imagin- 
ary person,  the  things  which  are,  without  historical  foundation, 
ascribed  to  Him  are  entirely  due  to  the  reverence  in  which  He 
was  held.     If,  accordingly,  we  find  in  the  Gospels  any  passages 

"  Pp.  ix.  ff. 


208  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

which  cannot  by  any  possibility  have  found  their  inspiration  in 
the  worshipful  regard  in  which  He  was  held,  and  which  in  fact 
are,  on  the  contrary,  incompatible  with  it,  they  in  themselves 
prove  that  the  Gospels  contain  at  least  something  that  has  been 
rightly  handed  down;  for  if  these  passages  had  not  been  handed 
down  to  the  Evangelists  and  those  who  preceded  them,  in  a 
manner  that  made  doubt  impossible,  they  would  never  have 
found  admission  into  our  Gospels  at  all. 

"Such  was  the  underlying  thought  when  in  the  Encyclopaedia 
Biblica,  §  131,  139  f,  I  characterized  nine  passages  in  the  Syn- 
optical Gospels  as  'the  foundation-pillars  for  a  truly  scientific 
life  of  Jesus.'  I  limited  myself  to  so  small  a  number  because  I 
desired  to  include  no  instance  against  the  evidential  value  of 
which  any  objection  could  possibly  be  taken  with  some  hope  of 
success;  and  further,  I,  of  set  purpose,  selected  only  those  pas- 
sages in  which  it  is  possible  to  show  from  the  text  of  the  Gos- 
pels themselves  that  they  are  incompatible  with  the  worship  in 
which  Jesus  came  to  be  held.  Thus  they  are,  all  of  them,  found 
only  in  one  Gospel,  or  at  most  two ;  the  second  and  third,  or 
the  third,  either  omits  the  passage  in  question,  although  by  uni- 
versal consent,  the  author  who  omits  must  have  known  at  least 
one  of  the  Gospels  in  which  it  occurs,  or  the  source  from  which 
it  was  drawn;  or  alternatively,  he  turns  it  round,  often  with 
great  ingenuity  and  boldness,  in  such  a  manner  that  it  loses  the 
element  which  makes  it  open  to  exception  from  the  point  of  view 
of  a  worshipper  of  Jesus." 

What  is  most  insisted  upon  in  this  statement  is  that  there 
are  sought  (and  found)  in  Schmiedel's  "pillar-passages" 
not  merely  affirmations  which  are  appropriate  to  a  human 
Jesus,  but  affirmations  which  are  impossible  for  a  Divine 
Jesus.  Their  characteristic  is,  as  Schmiedel  expresses  it  on 
a  later  page,^^  that  "they  are  not  consistent  with  the  wor- 
ship in  which  Jesus  had  come  to  be  held;"  that  they  "are 
appropriate  only  to  a  man,  and  could  never,  by  any  possi- 
bility, have  been  written  had  the  author  been  thinking  of 
a  demi-god."  There  are  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  as 
Schmiedel  explains,^^  three  classes  of  "sayings  of  Jesus 
(or,  to  speak  more  correctly,  passages  in  the  Synoptics 
about  Jesus)  :"  "first,  those  which  are  plainly  incredible; 
secondly,  those  which  are  plainly  credible;  and  in 
the   third   category    those   which    occupy   an    intermediate 

"  P.  xvii. 
"P.  xiv. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         209 

position  as  bearing  on  the  face  of  them  no  certain  mark 
either  of  incredibiHty  or  of  credibility."  This  is  Schmie- 
del's  way  of  saying  that  there  are  some  passages  which 
clearly  ascribe  a  supernatural  character  to  Jesus;  some 
which  are  clearly  inconsistent  with  a  supernatural  character 
in  Him;  and  still  some  others  which  do  not  raise  the  ques- 
tion of  His  supernatural  character  at  all.  This  third  class 
of  passages  Schmiedel  is  perfectly  willing  to  accept  as  trans- 
mitting a  true  tradition :  he  actually  does  so  accept  them. 
But  not  on  their  own  credit,  but  only  on  the  faith  of  the 
small  class  of  passages — his  "pillar-passages" — which  as- 
sure him  of  the  actual  existence  of  a  merely  human  Jesus 
to  whom,  then,  it  is  natural  to  ascribe  these  "indifferent" 
passages  also.  For,  as  he  says  in  his  primary  statement,^^ 
and  repeats  here  :^^  "If  we  discover  any  such  points — even 
if  only  a  few — they  guarantee  not  only  their  own  contents 
but  also  much  more.  For  in  that  case  one  may  also  hold 
as  credible  all  that  agrees  in  character  with  these,  and  is 
in  other  respects  not  open  to  suspicion."  The  fundamental 
characteristic  of  the  "pillar-passages,"  without  which  they 
would  not  be  "pillar-passages",  is,  therefore,  that  they  are 
absolutely  irreconcilable  with  a  supernatural  Jesus. 

The  statement  in  the  lecture  on  Jesus  and  Modern  Criti- 
cism^^ is  made  from  the  same  standpoint  as  that  in  the 
Preface  to  Neumann's  Jesus  and  adds  very  little  to  it.  We 
are  told  that  "it  is  of  little  use  merely  to  say  in  a  vague 
and  general  way  that  the  figure  of  Jesus  portrayed  in  the 
Gospels  could  not  possibly  have  been  invented."  What  is 
of  importance  is  that  we  should  recognize  that  "the  Gos- 
pels, though  they  seem  to  be  very  much  exposed  to  doubt, 
actually  contain  in  themselves  the  best  means  of  overcom- 
ing it." 

"All  that  we  require  to  do  is  to  limit  the  statement  that  their 
contents  could  not  have  been  invented,  which  in  its  vague  and 
general  form  possesses  no  evidential  value,  to  specific  passages 
in  which  it  is  not  open  to  question.    I  select  nine  such  passages, 

^Encyclopaedia  BibJica,  col.  1872,  §  131. 
^Neumann,  p.  xiii. 
'•Pp.  IS  ff. 


2IO  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

and,  in  order  to  emphasize  their  importance,  give  them  a  special 
name;  I  call  them  the  foundation-pillars  of  a  really  scientific 
life  of  Jesus. 

"Now  the  important  point  is  that  they  are  chosen  on  the  same 
principles  which  guide  every  critical  historian  in  extra-theologi- 
cal fields.  When  we  make  our  first  acquaintance  with  a  historical 
person  in  a  book  which  is  throughout  influenced  by  a  feeling  of 
worship  for  its  hero,  as  the  Gospels  are  by  a  feeling  of  worship 
for  Jesus,  in  the  first  rank  for  credibility  we  place  those  passages 
of  the  book  which  really  run  counter  to  this  feeling;  for  we 
realize  that  the  writer's  sentiments  being  what  they  were,  such 
passages  cannot  have  been  invented  by  the  author  of  the  book; 
nor  would  they  have  been  taken  from  the  records  at  his  service 
if  their  absolute  truthfulness  had  not  forced  itself  upon  him.  In 
the  case  of  the  Evangelists,  moreover,  we  are  so  fortunate  as 
to  be  able  to  note  how  a  record  of  this  kind  which  runs  counter 
to  the  author's  feeling  of  worship  for  Jesus  is  often  incorpor- 
ated by  one  or  by  two  of  them,  while  the  other  has  omitted  it 
or  has  altered  it  with  the  clear  intention  of  emphasizing  Jesus' 
higher  rank.  I  have  included  among  my  foundation-pillars  only 
such  passages  as  have  been  passed  over  or  altered  by  at  least 
one  of  the  three  Evangelists.  Of  course,  in  the  case  of  almost 
every  one  of  these,  it  has  already  been  said  once,  perhaps  often, 
that  it  could  not  be  the  product  of  an  inventive  mind.  What 
scholars  had  previously  neglected  to  do  was  to  make  these  pas- 
sages the  starting  point  for  the  critical  treatment  of  the  life 
of  Jesus.  .  .  . 

"What  then  have  I  gained  in  these  nine  foundation-pillars? 
You  will  perhaps  say,  'Very  little.'  I  reply,  'I  have  gained  just 
enough.'  ...  In  a  word,  I  know,  on  the  one  hand,  that  his 
person  cannot  be  referred  to  the  region  of  myth ;  on  the  other 
hand,  that  he  was  man  in  the  full  sense  of  the  term,  and  that, 
without  of  course  denying  that  the  divine  character  was  in  him, 
this  could  be  found  only  in  the  shape  in  which  it  could  be 
found  in  any  human  being. 

"I  think,  therefore,  that  if  we  knew  no  more,  we  should  know 
by  no  means  little  about  him.     But,   as  a  matter  of   fact,  the 
'foundation-pillars'   are  but  the   starting-point  of   our  study  of 
the    life    of    Jesus.  .  .  .  We    must,    therefore,    work    upon    the 
principle  that,   together  with  the   'foundation-pillars,'   and   as   a 
result  of  them,  everything  in  the  first  three   Gospels  deserves 
belief  which  would  tend  to  establish  Jesus'  greatness,  provided 
that  it  harmonizes   with  the  picture  produced  by  the   'founda- 
tion-pillars', and  in  other  respects  does  not  raise  suspicion." 
Certainly,  with  four  such  extended  expositions  of  his 
method,   it  would  be   difficult  seriously  to  misapprehend 
Schmiedel's  essential  meaning.   Nevertheless  some  difficulty 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  211 

has  apparently  been  experienced  in  grasping  at  once  what 
we  may  call  the  principle  of  direct  contradiction  which  forms 
its  core.  Even  Otto  Schmiedel,  for  example,  seems  to  lose 
hold  of  it, — although,  no  doubt  he  does  not  profess  to  do 
more  than  to  follow  his  brother's  scheme  "in  its  essen- 
tials."    His  version  of  it  runs  as  follows  :^^ 

"The  criticism  of  the  sources  has  brought  us  thus  far.  I  will 
now  make  a  further  attempt,  from  general  considerations  which 
are  independent  of  the  search  for  sources,  to  find  certain  points 
of  support  to  give  the  necessary  certainty  to  the  portrait  of  the 
life  of  Jesus  which  we  are  seeking  to  sketch.  We  have  recog- 
nized it  as  an  essential  characteristic  of  the  presentations  of  the 
lives  of  the  founders  of  religions  and  redemptive  personalities, 
that  they  glorify,  and  indeed  deify  these  personalities.  The 
more  this  tendency  increases  the  more  does  the  account  lose  its 
historical  character  and  become  legendary.  Let  us  turn  the  mat- 
ter around.  If  we  find  in  the  Gospels  passages  which  declare 
of  Jesus  something  in  contradiction  to  this  tendency  to  glori- 
fication, which,  however,  have  been  altered  or  omitted  by  later 
Gospels,  because  they  take  offence  at  these  human  things,  at  this 
lack  of  glorification,  then  we  may  with  assurance  infer  from 
this  that  these  passages  which  do  not  glorify  Jesus  are  old  and 
authentic." 

He  then  adduces  five  examples  of  such  passages,  inti- 
mating in  passing  that  many  more  might  be  produced,  and 
declares  of  them  in  the  mass  that  they  form  the  skeleton  of 
what  is  incontestable  and  thus  provide  a  solid  basis  for  the 
Life  of  Jesus.  Three  of  his  five  passages,  he  takes  over 
from  P.  W.  Schmiedel.  The  two  that  are  added  can  scarcely 
be  said  to  preserve  perfectly  the  characteristic  feature 
claimed  for  the  "pillar-passages," — express  contradiction  of 
the  deity  ascribed  to  Jesus  in  the  historical  tradition.  They 
are  expounded  by  Otto  Schmiedel  thus : 

"In  the  oldest  Gospel,  Mark,  it  is  continually  emphasized  that 
Jesus  forbade  His  disciples  to  make  His  deeds  of  healing  known. 
In  the  later  Gospels  this  trait  retires,  and  indeed  the  number 
and  importance  of  the  deeds  of  healing  steadily  increases.  This 
last  serves  for  glorification.  Therefore  the  representation  of 
Mark,  Jesus'  horror  of  being  trumpeted  as  a  miracle-worker,  is 
all  the  more  certainly  historical." 

"The  older  Gospels  relate,  with  assignment  of  reasons,  that 
Jesus   was   betrayed   by  Judas   Iscariot.     Luke  and   John   seek 

"Die  Hauptprohleme  der  Leben-Jesu  Forschung.'     igo6  pp.  46  ff. 


212  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

all  kinds  of  explanations  for  this,  while  the  enemies  of  Christianity 
mock  at  the  betrayal  of  the  Master  by  one  of  His  own  disciples: 
all  the  more  certain  is  it  that  the  betrayal  was  not  invented  by 
Jesus'  adherents,  but  is  old  and  historical." 
It  does  not  appear  why  a  divine,  no  less  than  a  human 
Jesus,  might  not,  for  reasons  of  His  own,  forbid  His  cures 
to  be  heralded  abroad;  or  why  a  divine,  no  less  than  a 
human  Jesus,  might  not  be  betrayed  by  one  of  His  own 
disciples.  The  stress  which  P.  W.  Schmiedel  lays  on  the 
contradiction  to  the  deity  of  Jesus  in  his  "pillar-passages," 
Otto  Schmiedel  lays  rather  on  modifications  by  later  Gospels 
of  statements  in  the  earlier  which  struck  the  Christian  feel- 
ing of  the  time  as  making  too  little  for  the  glory  of  Jesus. 
The  alteration  or  omission  of  the  statements  of  his  "pillar- 
passages"  by  one  or  another  of  the  Gospels  had  been  ap- 
pealed to  by  P.  W.  Schmiedel  only  as  a  secondary  consider- 
ation; it  bears  the  character  of  a  verification  of  the  as- 
serted offensiveness  of  these  passages  to  the  Christian  feel- 
ing of  the  day.  The  hinge  of  his  argument  turns  on  the 
intrinsic  inconsistency  of  these  statements  with  the  deifica- 
tion of  Jesus.  He  infers  immediately  from  this  their  "un- 
inventibility"  by  the  authors  of  the  Gospels  and  of  the 
tradition  which  the  Gospels  represent,  and  their  consequent 
originality.  The  hinge  of  Otto  Schmiedel's  argument,  on 
the  other  hand,  turns  on  the  modifications  which  these 
statements  have  suffered  at  the  hands  of  later  Evangelists. 
From  these  he  infers  the  relative  originality  of  the  simpler 
statement,  and  by  further  consequence  the  unpretentious- 
ness  of  Jesus'  self-manifestation.  The  movement  of 
thought  in  the  two  cases  is  not  only  different  but  directly 
opposite.  This  is  particularly  apparent  in  the  diverse  treat- 
ment given  by  the  two  writers  to  "the  pillar-passages"  which 
are  adduced  by  both.  On  Mark  vi.  5f  P.  W.  Schmiedel 
writes  :^^ 

"When  He  appeared  in  His  native  city  of  Nazareth  He  was 
sneered  at  as  one  of  whom  it  was  known  whose  son  and  brother 
He  was  and  was  made  to  feel  that  a  prophet  finds  no  honor  in 
His    own   country.     Now    in    Mark    (vi.   sf)    we   read    further: 


"^Das  vierte  Evangelium,  etc.,  pp.  31-32. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         213 

'And  He  could  not  do  any  mighty  work  there,  except  that  He 
healed  a  few  sick  folk  by  laying  His  hands  upon  them ;  and  He 
marveled  at  their  unbelief.'    He  could  not.    This  is  another  nar- 
rative like  that  of  the  sign  of  Jonah;  it  most  certainly  would 
not  be  found  in  our  Gospels  if  it  had  not  been  handed  down  by 
someone  who  had  himself  witnessed  the  occurrences   and  then 
been  repeated  unaltered.     How  unacceptable  it  must  have  been 
to  the  later  narrators,  all  of  whom,  Mark  not  excepted,   were 
convinced  of  Jesus'  power  to  work  miracles,  is  shown  by  Mat- 
thew, who   (xiii.  5  f)   reports  it  thus:     'And  He  did  there  not 
many  mighty  works,  because  of  their  unbelief.'  " 
In  Otto  Schmiedel's  hands,  we  find,  on  the  contrary,  this 
essentially  different  representation  (we  do  not  stop  to  point 
out  the  misreport  of  what  Mark  says,  or  even  the  remark- 
able illation)  :^^ 

In  Mk.  vi.  5  there  stands:  In  Nazareth  Jesus  could  work  no 
miraculous  cures  because  of  the  lack  of  faith  in  His  fellow- 
townsmen.  In  Mt.  xiii.  58:  'He  did  there  not  many  miracles.' 
It  is,  therefore,  historically  certain  His  healing  work  was  de- 
pendent psychologically  on  the  trust  of  those  who  sought  the 
healing." 

Of  Mk.  xiii.  32,  P.  W.  Schmiedel,  contrasting  it  with  John's 
ascription  of  omniscience  to  Jesus,  writes  :*^ 

"In  the  Synoptics  we  find  His  express  declaration  (Mk.  xiii. 
32)  that  'of  that  day,'  that  is  to  say  that  on  which  He  was  to 
return  from  heaven  in  order  to  establish  the  kingdom  of  God 
on  earth,  'or  of  that  hour,  knoweth  no  one,  not  even  the  angels 
in  heaven,  nor  yet  the  Son,  but  the  Father  only;'  another  one 
of  the  statements  which  certainly  no  one  of  His  worshippers 
invented.  Luke  leaves  it  out  altogether;  Matthew  (according 
to  the  probably  original  text)  at  least  the  decisive  words  'nor 
yet  the  Son.' " 

What  we  find  in  Otto  Schmiedel  is : 

"Mk.  xiii.  32  says :     Time  and  hour  when  the  Son  of  Man 

returns  on  the  clouds  of  heaven  knoweth  no  one,  not  even  the 

Son.    Mt.  xxiv.  36  leaves  out  'not  even  the  Son'  as  offensive  to 

him.     Therefore   these    words    are   genuine.     Jesus    claims    for 

Himself    therefore  no  knowledge  of  the  future." 

In  the  treatment  of  the  remaining  passage  adduced  by  them 

both  a  more  primary  place  seems  to  be  given  by  P.  W. 

Schmiedel  to  the  forms  in  which  it  appears  in  the  several 

Gospels.     This,  however,  is  an  illusion,  and  is  due  largely 


;p.  47. 

Das  znerte  Evangelium,  etc.,  p.  22. 


214  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

to  the  circumstance  that  his  primary  discussion  of  it  hap- 
pens to  be  introduced  at  that  point  in  his  argument  where 
he  is  preoccupied  with  the  relations  of  the  Gospels  to  one 
another.  ^^  As  in  the  other  cases  we  quote  what  he  says 
about  it  in  his  booklet  on  John's  Gospel  -.■*- 

"And  equally  unacceptable  to  the  Evangelist  would  be  the 
record  in  Mk.  (x.  17  f)  and  Lk.  that  Jesus,  to  the  address  of 
a  rich  man,  'Good  Master,  what  must  I  do  to  obtain  eternal 
life?'  replied:  'Why  callest  thou  me  good?  No  one  is  good 
except  God  alone.'  And  yet  beyond  question,  this  reply  came 
from  Jesus'  lips.  How  little  it  could  have  been  invented  by 
anyone  of  His  worshippers,  who  drive  the  pen  in  the  Gospels, 
Matthew  shows.  With  him  (xix.  16  f),  the  rich  man  says, 
'Master,  what  good  thing  must  I  do  in  order  to  have  eternal 
life?  And  Jesus  answers,  'Why  askest  thou  me  concerning  the 
good?  There  is  One  that  is  good.'  How  does  Jesus  come  here 
to  the  six  last  words?  Should  He  not,  since  He  was  asked  con- 
cerning the  good,  proceed:  'There  is  one  thing  that  is  good'? 
And  that  would  be  the  only  suitable  reply  not  only  because  of 
what  had  preceded,  but  also  because  of  what  follows;  for  Jesus 
says  further,  'If,  however,  thou  wouldst  enter  into  life,  keep 
the  commandments.'  Accordingly,  in  Jesus'  opinion,  the  good 
concerning  which  He  was  asked  consists  in  keeping  the  com- 
mandments. How  did  Matthew  come  to  the  words,  'There  is 
One  that  is  good'?  Only  by  having  before  him,  as  he  wrote, 
the  language  of  Mark.  Here  we  have  our  finger  on  the  way  in 
which  Matthew,  with  conscious  purpose,  altered  this  language  in 
its  opening  words,  so  that  it  should  no  longer  be  offensive,  and 
on  the  way  in  which,  at  the  end,  he  has  left  a  few  words  of  it 
unaltered,  which  betray  to  us  the  manner  in  which  the  thing  has 
been  done." 
Here  also  Otto  Schmiedel's  whole  case  is  summed  up  in 
the  relations  of  the  Synoptical  reports : 

"Here  also  belongs  the  passage  which  has  been  mentioned 
in  another  connection,**  where  Jesus,  in  Mk.  x.  18,  said  to  the 
rich  young  man,  'Why  callest  thou  me  good.  No  one  is  good 
except  God.'  Jesus  denies,  therefore.  His  absolute  sinlessness. 
Mat.  xix.  17  seeks  to  efface  this." 

"^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1847  (b). 

*»P.  19. 

*•  Cf.  p.  27 :  "In  Mk.  x.  18  Jesus  says  to  the  rich  young  man,  'Why 
callest  thou  me  good?  No  one  is  good  except  God.'  To  Matthew 
(xix.  17)  this  statement  seemed  to  put  the  sinlessness  of  Jesus  in 
danger,  and  so  he  changed  it  to,  'Why  askest  thou  me  concerning  the 
good  (neuter)  ?'  Now,  however,  the  following,  'No  one  is  good,'  etc., 
naturally  no  longer  fits  on." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         21 5 

The  same  imperfect  grasp  upon  the  exact  point  of  the 
"pillar-passages"  which  deflects  Otto  Schmiedel's  treatment 
of  them,  has  affected  also  the  use  made  of  them  by  Schmie- 
del's pupil,  Arno  Neumann.  Neumann  does,  indeed,  quite 
purely  reproduce  Schmiedel's  point  of  view  in  his  general 
statement.  After  having  likened  the  attempt  to  get  at  the 
true  tradition  of  Jesus'  life,  to  working  through  a  series  of 
geological  strata,  he  raises  the  question  whether  this  does 
not  "make  the  whole  foundation  of  our  knowledge  of  Jesus 
precarious,  and  open  a  door  to  all  kinds  of  arbitrary  con- 
jecture."   He  then  proceeds  :^^ 

"It  would  do  so  if  we  did  not  come  upon  such  elements  in  the 
tradition  as  the  worshippers  of  Jesus  would  never  have  pre- 
served unless  they  had  been  handed  down  as  facts  in  the  story 
of  Jesus'  life,  or  if  we  were  no  longer  able  to  show  from  the 
parallel  accounts  how  worship  has  constantly  changed  the  old 
data  handed  down  by  traditions  and  adapted  them  to  its  own 
wishes.  But  we  do  find  sayings  and  incidents  of  this  descrip- 
tion in  one  or  other  of  the  Gospels,  be  they  few  or  many,  and, 
this  being  so,  we  are  entitled  to  dray/  from  them  general  in- 
ferences as  to  what  is  credible  in  the  life  and  work  of  Jesus. 
For  it  is  impossible  (here  every  historian  will  agree)  for  one 
who  worships  a  hero  to  think  and  speak  in  such  a  way  as  to 
contradict  or  essentially  modify  his  own  worship.*"*  Statements 
which  do  this  can  be  nothing  more  or  less  than  survivals  of  the 
truth,  precious  fragments  which  have  been  covered  and  well- 
nigh  hidden  for  ever  by  the  deposits  of  later  times.  For  this 
reason  a  scholar  of  our  own  time,  Dr.  Schmiedel,  has  called 
these  portions  of  the  tradition,  'foundation-pillars  of  the  Hfe  of 
Jesus.'  The  existence  of  such  statements  is  the  salvation  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  giving  them  a  definite  value  of  sources.*'  The 
Gospels  cannot  be  pure  sagas  or  legends  when  material  so  in- 
tractable is  enshrined  in  them." 

Perhaps  a  certain  imperfection  in  Neumann's  apprecia- 
tion of  the  stringency  of  the  presumed  effect  of  the  "pillar- 
passages"  is  already  betrayed  by  the  admission  of  an  al- 
ternative expression  into  the  phrase  declaring  it  impossible 

**  Jesus,  pp.  9  ff. 

^'More  literally:  "For  every  historian  will  pronounce  it  impossi- 
ble that  one  who  reverences"  (or  "worships")  "a  hero  should  invent 
or  assert  things  which  contradict  his  own  reverence"  (or  "worship"), 
"or  modify  it  fundamentally." 

**More  literally:  "By  their  presence  a  certain  source-value  is  pre- 
served to  the  Synoptic  Gospels." 


2l6  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

for  a  worshiping  writer  to  invent  or  assert  anything  not 
merely  which  contradicts  but  also  which  "essentially  modi- 
fies" his  own  worship.  We  perceive  clearly  his  defection 
from  this  stringency,  however,  only  when  we  scan  his  il- 
lustrative passages..  He  adduces  eight  of  these,  two  of 
Schmiedel's  being  omitted,  and  a  new  one  added  and  in- 
deed given  the  premier  place  in  the  list.  The  two  omitted' — 
Mk.  viii.  14-21,  and  Mt.  xi.  5 — are  both,  in  Schmiedel's 
view,  "transformed  parables"  and  the  inclusion  of  them  in 
the  "pillar-passages"  is  in  any  case  surprising,  so  that  we 
need  not  wonder  that  Neumann  omits  them,  although  per- 
fectly agreeing  with  Schmiedel  that  they  are  "transformed 
parables. "'^''^  The  passage  added  is  however,  as  little  strin- 
gent as  any  could  be.  It  is,  "Lk.  ii.  52  {cf.  iv.  16),  which 
says  that  Jesus  grew  in  stature  in  a  truly  human  way." 
"Had  the  writer  been  a  worshipper  of  Jesus  as  a  deity," 
Neumann  comments,  "he  would  have  presented  Him  to  us 
as  full-grown," — of  which  we  have  no  other  assurance, 
however,  than  this  expression  of  opinion  by  Neumann  him- 
self, in  opposition  to  the  example  of  Matthew  and  Luke, 
both  of  whom  were  "worshippers  of  Jesus"  and  both  of 
whom  record  the  story  of  His  infancy.  But  what  most 
clearly  shows  us  the  imperfection  of  Neumann's  grasp  on 
the  peculiarity  of  the  "pillar-passages"  is  a  remark  he  ad- 
joins at  the  end  of  the  list,  in  which  he  endeavors  to  make 
them  do  double  duty.  "All  these  passages,"  he  tells  us, 
"are  of  such  a  nature  as  neither  the  worship  of  Jesus  in  the 
growing  church,  nor  yet  the  religious  socialism  of  the 
masses,  could  ever  have  invented.  "^^  But  why  could  not 
a  "religious  socialist"  believe  that  Jesus  grew  up  like  any. 
other  boy?  Or  that  Jesus  refused  to  work  "signs,"  or  in- 
deed that  He  could  not  work  miracles;  or  that  He  did  not 

"See  pp.  86,  76.  Neumann  calls  attention  on  p.  11,  note  i,  to  his 
passing  them  by  here,  apparently  in  order  to  avoid  giving  the  impres- 
sion that  he  is  correcting  Schmiedel. 

"The  German  is  perhaps  a  little  more  lucid:  "The  list  of  passages 
which  the  common  reverence  of  the  growing  church,  or  for  that  mat- 
ter the  religious  socialism  of  the  masses  could  never  have  invented." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  21/ 

know  all  that  the  future  had  in  store  for  Him  or  His  fol- 
lowers? Or,  indeed,  that  He  was  not  absolutely  without 
sin,  or  could  be  thought  by  His  kinspeople  to  be  out  of  His 
head,  or  could  have  felt  Himself  deserted  by  God  in  the 
end?  Socialists  in  our  own  day  seem  to  have  no  difficulty 
in  believing  such  things.  Neumann  has  obviously  tempor- 
arily lost  the  exact  point  of  view  of  the  "pillar-passages," 
and  consequently  has  confused  the  argument  which  is  built 
upon  them.  We  say  he  has  "temporarily"  lost  their  point 
of  view ;  for  he  immediately  recovers  it  and  writes : 

"They  prove,  it  is  true,  that  we  have  before  us  in  Jesus  origi- 
nally a  'genuinely  human  figure.'     Of  'deity'  we  can  therefore 
speak   in    connection    with    Him    only    as    it    is    possible   within 
the  limits  of  the  human.  .  .  ." 
He  was,  no  doubt,  greatly  human,  and  we  must  of  course 
paint  Him  so ;  but 

"We  must  now  still  add  the  critical  limitation:  so  far  as  it 
readily   (muhelos)    permits  itself  to  be  ranged  within  the  iron 
limits  of  that  knowledge  derived  from  the  'foundation-pillars.' " 
We  know  much  more  of  Jesus  than  we  can  learn  from  the 
"pillar-passages" ;  but  the  Jesus  we  know  cannot  transcend 
the  Jesus  of  these  fundamental  texts.     They  give  us  the 
absolute  norm  of  what  Jesus  was. 

The  tendency  of  Schmiedel's  followers  to  abate  a  little 
of  the  stringency  of  the  idea  of  the  "pillar-passages"  means, 
of  course,  a  tendency,  more  or  less  developed,  to  look  at 
them  broadly  as  passages  which  do  not  find  their  explana- 
tion in  "the  faith  of  the  community"  and  may  therefore 
very  well  be  (or  perhaps  we  may  insist,  are  most  probably, 
or  even  quite  certainly)  genuine  traditions;  rather  than  nar- 
rowly, as  passages  which,  because  they  directly  contradict 
the  reverence  for  Jesus  which  forms  the  primary  bias  of 
the  vehicles  of  the  tradition,  oral  or  written,  that  has  pre- 
served for  us  the  memory  of  Jesus,  must  therefore  neces- 
sarily preserve  true  traditions  and  give  us  not  only  our  most 
reliable  knowledge  of  Jesus  but  knowledge  of  Him  which 
is  absolutely  trustworthy.  And  this  change  in  point  of 
view,  as  we  cannot  have  failed  to  observe,  is  accompanied 
by  an  associated  tendency  to  treat  the  appeal  to  such  "pil- 


215  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

lar-passages"  not  so  much  as  a  substitute  for  literary  criti- 
cism— though  this  is  the  precise  thing  which  commends  the 
appeal  to  them  to  Schmiedel  himself — as  rather  as  a  sup- 
plement to  it,  called  in  only  after  it  has  done  its  work,  to 
enable  us  to  take  a  step  farther  than  it  can  lead  us.  These 
tendencies,  in  proportion  as  they  are  yielded  to,  are  tanta- 
mount, of  course,  to  desertion  of  all  that  is  distinctive  in 
Schmiedel's  critical  method  and  reversion  to  the  common 
methods  of  "Liberal"  criticism,  which  first  employs  literary 
criticism  in  order  to  ascertain  what  the  oldest  sources  con- 
tain, and  then  calls  in  historical  criticism, — operating  on  the 
single  canon  that  we  are  to  penetrate  by  its  aid  behind  "the 
faith  of  the  community" — that  we  may  ascertain  what,  in 
that  which  is  transmitted  by  the  sources,  is  true.  It  will 
conduce  to  a  better  understanding,  both  of  the  general 
"Liberal"  method  and  of  the  peculiarity  of  Schmiedel's 
method  if  we  bring  into  view  a  tolerably  full  account  of  the 
"Liberal"  method  in  one  of  its  most  consistent  and  yet 
genial  recent  exponents.  We  cannot  do  better  for  this  pur- 
pose than  turn  to  the  exposition  of  it  by  W.  Heitmiiller,  in 
his  interesting  article  "Jesus  Christ"  in  Schiele  and  Zschar- 
nack's  encyclopaedia,  published  under  the  title  of  Die  Re- 
ligion in  Geschichte  und  Gegenwart."^^  The  circumstances 
that  Heitmiiller  is  writing  for  a  general,  educated  and  not 
merely  a  technically  theological  public,  and  that  Schmie- 
del's criticism  is  apparently  not  wholly  out  of  his  thought, 
only  add  to  the  value  of  his  exposition  for  our  purposes. 
At  the  point  at  which  we  enter  his  discussion  he  is  engaged 
in  searching  out  the  trustworthy  sources  of  knowledge  of 
Jesus.  He  has  just  outlined  the  processes  by  which  the 
evangelical  documents  are  tested.  It  has  been  a  long  and 
difficult  task  to  penetrate  by  this  criticism  to  their  Sources, 
and  when  we  have  reached  these  Sources  our  labors  are 
far  from  being  at  an  end.  Mark  and  the  Discourse-Source 
are  after  all  not  the  ultimate  Sources.  The  ultimate  Sources 
are  "the  separate  narratives  and  separate  declarations  or 

**Vol.  iii.  1912,  pp.  356  ff. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  219 

discourses  of  Jesus  to  be  obtained  from  these  and  from 
the  peculiar  portions  of  Matthew  and  Luke,  by  the  help  of 
critical  labor."  And  then,  when  we  have  got  these  well 
before  us,  we  have  to  raise  the  question  whether  they  give 
us  "immediately  historical,  utilizable,  trustworthy  material." 
"Is  the  portrait  of  Jesus, — no,  are  the  separate  features  of 
this  portrait  which  look  out  upon  us  from  these  separate 
fragments — really  genuine  features"  ?^^  From  the  Dis- 
course-Source and  Mark  (which  with  Heitmiiller  is  the 
Narrative-Source),  on  to  John  we  have  found  everything 
in  a  flux.  What  was  there  previous  to  the  Discourse- 
Source  and  Mark?  Were  not  the  same  forces  which  modi- 
fied the  transmission  subsequently  already  at  work  before 
these  Sources  arose?  The  question  requires  only  to  be 
put  for  the  answer  to  come  clearly  back  to  us. 

"These  narratives  and  declarations  were  taken  from  the  oral 
tradition  of  the  Christian  community  and  written  down  about 
60  or  70  A.D. ;  thus  they  had  lived  for  thirty  or  forty  years 
in  the  oral  tradition,  they  were  handed  on  from  mouth  to  mouth, 
from  hand  to  hand,  through  how  many  hands !  What  lived 
on  further  and  was  preserved  was  necessarily  conditioned  in 
its  very  substance  by  the  nature  and  the  need  of  the  community. 
Accordingly,  we  must  suppose  it  at  least  possible  that  these 
separate  materials,  as  they  are  accessible  to  us  in  Mark,  say,  have 
been  influenced  by  the  faith  of  the  community  and  those  other 
entities.  That  means,  however,  that  the  ultimate  direct  Sources 
which  can  be  reached  by  us,  the  separate  declarations  and  nar- 
ratives, do  not,  when  taken  strictly,  carry  us  beyond  the  portrait 
of  the  Christ  of  the  Palestinian  community  of  about  50-70 
A.D.  To  turn  aside  here  from  everything  else  for  the  sake  of 
brevity,  we  need  only  to  realize  that  the  community  which 
transmitted  orally  knowledge  of  Jesus,  stood  under  the  influence 
of  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  Jesus;  how  this  belief  must 
already  have  steeped  even  good  reminiscences  in  an  alien,  new 
light!  Nay,  must  we  not  assume  that  even  for  the  immediate 
disciples  recollection  was  disturbed  in  many  points  by  the  in- 
fluence of  the  Easter  experience  and  the  faith  which  attaches 
itself  to  it?  And  in  point  of  fact  a  more  careful  scrutiny  shows 
that  even  in  this  oldest  obtainable  memorial,  of  separate  declara- 
tions and  separate  narratives,  legendary  traits  are  present,  that 
the  belief  and  usage  of  the  community  have  already  exerted 
their  moulding  and  forming  power  and  activity."" 
"P.  356. 
"  Pp.  356-7. 


220  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

It  is  in  this  circumstance  that  the  difficulty  of  research  into 
the  life  of  Jesus  lies.  "The  starting-point  of  all  further 
investigation  is  recognition  that  the  ultimate  Direct-Sources 
carry  us  only  to  the  portrait  of  Jesus  of  the  primitive  com- 
munity of  about  60  A.D."^^  The  question  is  whether  we 
have  any  means — any  possibility — of  getting  behind  the 
portrait  of  Jesus  of  the  community  to  the  actual  reality. 
Some  are  utterly  sceptical  of  doing  so.  But  this  extreme 
scepticism  is  unreasonable.  It  is  not  difficult  to  show  that 
the  portrait  of  Christ  current  in  the  community  of  60  A.D. 
is  not  a  simply  imaginai-y  one. 

"That  in  spite  of  legendary,  mythological  elements,  in  spite 
of  the  repainting  by  the  faith  of  the  community,  which  must 
be  admitted,  in  this  Evangelical  representation,  there  are  his- 
torical elements  in  the  ultimate  sources  of  which  we  have  spoken, 
will,  in  accordance  with  universally  recognized  principles,  have 
to  be  allowed  to  be  certain  if  constituents  are  found  in  them 
which  are  not  reconcilable  (vereinbar)  with  the  faith  of  the 
community  to  which  the  whole  portrait  belongs.  What  does 
not  stand  in  harmony  with  it  can  certainly  not  owe  its  origin 
to  it.  Not  a  few  constituents,  now,  of  this  kind  are  found. 
They  not  seldom  betray  themselves  as  contradictory  to  the 
faith  of  the  community  by  this — that  they  are  omitted  or  al- 
tered by  the  later  narrators.  Let  us  indicate  some  of  them." 
In  Mk.  X.  17  ff.  Jesus  repudiates  the  address  of  'Good  Master' 
with  the  words,  'Why  callest  thou  me  good?  None  is  good  but 
God  only.'  The  community  looked  upon  its  Lord  as  sinless; 
this  account  is  not  then  the  product  of  their  belief.  How  little 
the  declaration  of  Jesus  pleased  the  community  is  shown  by 
its  alteration  by  the  later  Mt.  xix.  16  ff,  which  formulates  the 
question  of  the  young  man  thus :  'Master,  what  good  thing 
must  I  do?'  and  makes  Jesus  answer:  'Wherefore  askest  thou 
me  concerning  the  good?  Only  One  is  good.'  .  .  .  The  Geth- 
semane  scene,  Mk.   xiv.  32-42  which   shows  Jesus   in   deep   dis- 

"^'P.  357. 

"  It  will  be  observed  that  of  the  six  passages  here  adduced  by  Heit- 
miiller,  two  are  common  to  him  and  Schmiedel  (Mk.  x.  17;  iii.  21),  and 
a  third  is  of  the  same  character  (Mk.  ix.  22-32,  and  is,  of  course, 
looked  upon  by  Schmiedel  in  the  same  light  as  the  others  (see  Das 
vierte  Evangeliunt,  etc.,  p.  20)  ;  a  fourth,  the  Parable  of  the  Lost 
Son  (Lk.  XV.  II  ff)  although  belonging  to  another  catagory  is,  of 
course,  also  accepted  as  genuine  by  Schmiedel  with  the  same  hearti- 
ness as  by  Heitmiiller  (Encyclofyaedia  Biblica,  col.  1841,  3)  ;  while 
the  two  remaining  ones  concern  the  sensitivity  of  the  early  community 
for  the  honor  of  the  Apostles,  not  of  Jesus. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S     'PILLAR-PASSAGES  221 

tress,  could  never  have  been  invented  by  the  believing  commun- 
ity; it  glorified  Him  precisely  as  one  who  went  of  His  own 
will  to  His  death.  Luke  softens  down  the  account;  John  omits 
it.  The  story  of  Mk.  iii.  21,  according  to  which  His  own  people 
say  of  Jesus,  'He  is  beside  Himself,'  cannot  be  understood  as 
an  invention  of  the  faith  which  glorified  Jesus :  Matthew  and 
Luke  pass  the  story  by.  The  community  saw  in  Peter  its  chief 
Apostle :  it  cannot  have  invented  his  shameful  denial.  The  com- 
munity glorified  the  disciples :  the  story  of  their  cowardly  flight 
(Mk.  xiv.  58)  when  Jesus  went  to  His  death,  was  certainly  not 
the  product  of  their  fancy:  Luke  and  John  suppress  this  also. 
It  was  early  the  belief  of  the  community  (i  Cor.  xv.  i  ff)  that 
Jesus  died  for  the  sins  of  men.  And  yet  in  the  old  tradition 
there  are  very  few  declarations  in  which  this  belief  has  found 
any  sort  of  expression  (Mk.  x.  45;  ix.  24)  ;  but  there  has  been 
preserved  on  the  other  hand  a  parable  (Lk.  xv.  11  ff),  that  of 
the  Lost  Son,  which  is  utterly  irreconcilable  with  this  dominant 
idea."  These  and  other  observations  suffice  to  prove  with  com- 
pelling convincingness  that  in  the  community's  portrait  of  Jesus, 
about  50-70  A.D.,  there  are  in  any  case  contained  and  are  recog- 
nizable some  indubitably  genuine  original  traits.  This  fact, 
now,    is    adapted    to    strengthen    confidence    in   the   tradition    in 

"We  may  ask  in  passing  what  ground  on  Heitmiiller's  principles 
there  is  for  assigning  Lk.  xv.  11  ff  to  the  oldest  tradition,  seeing  that 
it  occurs  neither  in  Mk.  nor  in  the  Discourse-Source.  Heitmiiller's 
account  of  the  parables  (p.  361)  is:  "With  respect  to  the  apothegms 
and  parables  the  principle  that  that  will  pass  for  genuine  which  seems 
individual,  striking  and  original,  will  not  be  wholly  rejected,  but  as  a 
principle  which  is  not  decisive,  will  be  applied  only  with  the  greatest 
caution."  Cf.  Schmiedel,  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1841.  From  our 
own  point  of  view,  there  is  of  course  no  reason  why  the  matter  pecul- 
iar to  Luke  should  not  be  of  as  indisputable  originality  as  that  which  is 
common  to  him  with  Matthew  or  with  Matthew  and  Mark.  Cf. 
Schmiedel,  ibid.,  col.  1868;  and  especially  Weinel,  ZTItK,  1910,  i.  p.  24: 
"Finally  Wellhausen  has  ventured  on  the  proposition :  'The  pre- 
supposition is  self-evident  that  we  must  recognize  in  the  peculiar  mat- 
ter which  is  found  in  one  of  the  Evangelists,  the  latest  literary  stratum' 
(Einleitung,  etc.,  p.  73).  That  is  true — provided  only,  precisely  in 
Wellhausen,  it  does  not  mean  more  than  it  says,  provided  only  there 
is  not  continually  connected  with  it  an  attempt  to  assign  to  these 
passages  a  lower  rank  not  only  literarily  but  also  historically,  that  is 
to  say  with  reference  to  their  value  as  sources.  It  is  however,  wholly 
false  to  hold  a  narrative  better  attested  for  this  reason — that  three 
Evangelists  (that  means,  however,  Mark,  which  the  others  follow)  or 
that  two  (that  means,  however,  the  Discourse-Source)  report  it— 
than  if  only  one  (that  means  another  tradition)  reports  it.  That  a 
tradition  has  been  written  down  say  ten  years  after  Mark  does  not 
weight  it  with  a  presupposition  against  it." 


222  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

general.  For  if,  as  we  see  here,  the  community  has  transmitted 
declarations  and  narratives  which  contradict  its  own  conception, 
it  follows  that  this  community  has  shown  respect  for  the  tra- 
dition, and  in  any  case  has  not  set  itself  simply  to  suppress 
what  was  unpleasant  to  it.  And  now,  there  force  themselves 
on  the  attentive  eye  other  observations  also  which  operate  greatly 
to  strengthen  confidence  in  the  oldest  tradition. "°° 
Heitmiiller  then  proceeds  to  adduce  the  Aramaic  coloring 
of  the  basis  of  both  Mark  and  the  Discourse-Source,  their 
particularity  in  intimate  details,  the  general  tone  of  the 
Discourse-Source,  the  cultivated  memories  of  the  men  of 
the  day,  as  conducing  to  the  conclusion  that  there  is  much 
gold  mingled  with  the  dross  in  the  tradition.^ ^  The  ques- 
tion is  how  the  gold  is  to  be  extracted.  And  the  answer  is 
that  first,  by  literary  criticism,  the  oldest  attainable  form 
of  each  narrative  or  declaration  is  to  be  established,  and 
then  historical  criticism  is  to  be  called  in.  At  the  founda- 
tion is  to  be  laid  "the  material  which  runs  counter  to  the 
belief,  the  theology,  the  customs,  the  cultus  of  the  primitive 
community,  or  which  at  least  does  not  completely  corre- 
spond with  it."  "We  may  have,"  he  declares,  "uncondi- 
tional confidence  in  such  material."  We  may  admit,  along 
with  this,  much  that  stands  in  close  relation  with  it,  and 
yet  is  in  harmony  with  the  belief  of  the  community.  On 
the  other  hand,  we  must  pronounce  ungenuine  everything 
which  "all  too  plainly  corresponds  with  the  belief,  the  cultus, 
and  the  dogmatic  and  apologetical  needs  of  the  com- 
munity, or  can  be  explained  only  from  them."  Our  scrupu- 
losity must  be  particularly  active  "against  everything  that 
lay  especially  at  the  heart  of  the  oldest  Christianity"' — such 
as  belief  in  Jesus'  messiahship,  His  approaching  return,  the 
whole  domain  of  so-called  eschatology,  His  passion  and  res- 
urrection, His  miraculous  power.  In  this  careful  and  la- 
borious fashion  it  will  be  possible  to  penetrate  behind  the 
community's  portrait  of  Christ  at  about  60  A.D.  and  ai>- 
proach  the  truth  about  Jesus. 

The  critical  methods  of  Schmiedel  and  Heitmiiller  are 

"Pp.  359  ff. 
"  P.  361. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  223 

fundamentally  the  same;  and  yet  they  differ  at  cardinal 
points.  Heitmiiller,  as  well  as  Schmiedel,  acknowledges 
the  failure  of  literary  criticism  to  reach  a  stratum  of  tra- 
dition in  which  Jesus  is  other  than  the  divine  figure  which 
the  Evangelists  paint  Him;  and  like  Schmiedel  he  calls  in 
historical  criticism  to  recover  some  trustworthy  traces  of 
a  merely  human  Jesus.  He  applies  this  historical  criticism, 
however,  only  to  the  Sources  which  literary  criticism  has 
unearthed,  and  therefore  finds  his  "pillar-passages"  not, 
as  Schmiedel  does,  in  any  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  indif- 
ferently, but  all  in  Mark,  which  is  to  him  the  Narrative- 
Source.^'^  The  principle  of  his  "pillar-passages"  is  not  as 
with  Schmiedel  (or  at  least  not  so  openly)  narrowly  that 
they  directly  contradict  the  deifying  conception  of  Jesus 
which  dominated  the  transmitters  of  the  tradition,  but  more 
broadly  that  they  contradict,  ,or  at  least  do  not  find  their 
explanation  in  the  general  point  of  view  of  the  early 
Christian  community,  they  do  not  reflect  "interests"  of  that 
community.  Accordingly  the  evidential  value  of  these  "pil- 
lar-passages" as  witnesses  to  the  real  Jesus  is  hardly  as  great 
with  Heitmiiller  as  with  Schmiedel.  With  Heitmiiller  they 
form  no  doubt  as  with  Schmiedel  the  nucleus  of  "all  sound 
historical  knowledge  of  Jesus,"  but  they  scarcely  come  with 
the  demonstrative  force  which  they  take  on  in  Schmiedel's 
hands,  placing  beyond  all  possibility  of  question  both  the 
actual  existence  and  the  purely  human  character  of  Jesus. 
From  the  "pillar-passages"  both  work  outwards  to  the 
same  general  results  with  respect  both  to  the  compass  of 
the  transmitted  material  which  may  be  utilized  in  forming 
our  picture  of  Jesus  and  His  life  and  work;  and  with 
respect  to  the  actual  portrait  of  Jesus  which  is  derived  from 
this  material  as  the  genuine  Jesus  of  history.  The  princi- 
ple of  the  construction  of  the  real  Jesus  of  history  in 
both  writers  alike  is  that  of  contradiction  to  the  whole  mass 
of  the  testimony  concerning  Him,  which  is  set  aside  on  no 
other  ground  than  that  it  is  possible  to  find  here  and  there 


For  exceptions,  see  above  note  54. 


224  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

imbedded  in  it  a  statement  which  seems  to  these  writers  not 
perfectly  consistent  with  its  general  drift.  As  to  the  legiti- 
macy of  this  procedure,  particularly  when  the  mass  and 
weight  of  the  testimony  is  considered,  and  the  number  and 
character  of  the  contradictory  passages,  we  for  the  moment 
leave  the  reader  to  judge  for  himself. 

Although  Schmiedel's  critical  method  has  been  before 
the  public  since  1901,  and  very  fully  since  1906,  it  has  as 
yet  been  subjected  to  very  little  formal  criticism.  This  has 
been  due  partly,  no  doubt,  to  a  feeling  that  it  is  only  a 
modification — and  that  not  a  very  important  modification' — 
of  the  ordinary  critical  procedure  in  general  use  among 
"Liberal"  theologians,  and  partly  to  a  greater  or  less  failure 
to  apprehend  precisely  the  nature  of  the  modification  in  the 
ordinary  "Liberal"  procedure  which  it  proposes.  Perhaps 
also  account  should  be  taken  of  the  circumstance  that  no 
separate  work  has  been  devoted  by  Schmiedel  himself  to 
the  exposition  of  his  proposals,  but  they  have  been  pre- 
sented only  incidentally  in  works  whose  chief  concernment 
lies  elsewhere.  In  reviews  of  these  publications  there  has 
been,  of  course,  some  expression  of  opinion  upon  this  por- 
tion of  their  contents  also,  more  or  less  fully  supported  by 
reasoning.  Only  here  and  there,  however,  has  there  been 
any  extended  discussion  of  the  new  critical  method  in  its 
details,  except  indeed  at  the  hands  of  the  extreme  radicals, 
who  deny  the  very  existence  of  Jesus.^®  It  is  part  of 
Schmiedel's   contention,    it   will   be    remembered,    that   his 


"E.g.  John  M.  Robertson,  Pagan  Christs,  1903,  pp.  227-238;  Fried- 
rich  Steudel,  Im  Kampf  um  die  Christusmythe,  1910,  pp.  88-110; 
William  Benjamin  Smith,  Ecce  Deus:  die  urchristliche  Lehre  des 
reingdttlichcn  Jesus,  191 1,  pp.  104-224  (E.  T.  under  same  title,  1912)  ; 
Arthur  Drews,  Die  Zeugnisse  fiir  die  Geschichtlichkeit  Jcsu,  191 1,  pp. 
212-225  (E.  T.  The  Witnesses  to  the  Historicity  of  Jesus.  1912,  pp. 
T44-T56).  With  these  writers,  no  doubt,  Eduard  Hertlein  Protestant- 
ische  Monatshefte,  x.  (1906),  pp.  390  ff  may  be  classed  for  the 
essence  of  the  matter  without  danger  of  great  injustice.  Cf.  also  F. 
Ziller,  Die  moderne  Bibelwissenschaft  und  die  Krisis  der  eivngelischen 
Kirche,  1910,  pp.  117-118.  Schmiedel  replies  elaborately  to  Robertson 
in  his  preface  to  Neumann's  Jesus,  and  to  Hertlein  in  the  next 
number  of  the  Protestantische  Monatshefte. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  225 

method  supplies  a  short  and  easy  demonstration  of  the 
actual  existence  of  Jesus.  This  side  of  his  contention  has 
attracted  the  attention  and  drawn  the  fire  of  those  writers 
who  are  engaged  in  an  attempt  to  persuade  the  public  that 
the  whole  figure  of  Jesus  is  mythical.  Little  of  value  in 
the  way  of  general  criticism  of  Schmiedel's  method  could 
be  expected  from  this  quarter;  and  in  point  of  fact  these 
writers  usually  lose  themselves  quickly  in  discussions  of  the 
exegesis  of  the  passages  adduced  b)^  Schmiedel  as  "pillar- 
passages,"  ordinarily  in  an  effort  to  vacate  their  literal 
sense  and  to  impose  on  them  a  purely  symbolical  signifi- 
cance, which  would  make  them  part  and  parcel  of  the 
myth  of  Jesus,  the  pure  product  of  the  invention  of  His 
votaries. 

"There    are    no    passages    in    the    Gospels,"    declares    W.    B. 
Smith,'*  "which  testify  to  a  pure  humanity  for  Jesus.     It  is  of 
course  set  forth  how  He  teaches,  journeys  from  place  to  place, 
how  even  He  sleeps  and   (in  a  very  transparent  parable)   hun- 
gers,   how    he    works    miracles,    is    arrested,    imprisoned,    tried, 
condemned,   executed,  buried  and   rises  again.     But  all   this  is 
intended    only   figuratively;    it   is   only   the    linen    cloth   that    is 
thrown  around  the  divine  form  of  the  'new  doctrine';  it  is  only 
the  historical  projection  of   a  system  of   religious  ideas.     The 
profound    thinkers    who    invented    these    parables    and    symbols 
were  fully  conscious  of  their  real  inward  meaning,  as  were  also 
those  who  first  heard  them,  and  repeated  and  recorded  them." 
Nevertheless  the  broader  question  is  not  wholly  left  to  one 
side,  nor  are  there  lacking  in  the  remarks  devoted  to   it 
criticisms  which,  if  they  do  not  quite  go  to  the  root  of  the 
matter,  yet  have  real  validity  as  against  Schmiedel's  modes 
of  presenting  his  argument.     It  is  common  to  all  of  these 
writers,  for  example,  to  point  out  that  this  argument  proves 
too  much;  that,  if  it  were  valid,  there  are  few  characters 
of  fiction,  professed  or  mythical,  which  we  should  not  have 
to   recognize   as   having   really   existed.      Thus,    Friedrich 
Steudel  urges  :®^ 

"There  is  a  fatal  flaw  involved  in  the  whole  of  the  demonstra- 
tion which  Schmiedel  essays.  It  is,  no  doubt,  true  that  when  a 
historian  portrays  a  personality  the  historicity  of  which  is  oth- 


'  Ecce  Dens,  p.  199. 
'  P.  98. 


226  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

erwise  established,  most  credit  will  be  given  to  those  accounts 
which  stand  in  a  certain  contradiction  to  the  characterization 
which  is  intended  to  be  given  of  him  in  general.  But  it  could 
■never  be  erected  into  a  universally  valid  method,  to  conclude 
solely  from  the  presence  of  such  traits  in  a  tradition  to  the 
historicity  of  a  personality  depicted  in  it.  For  in  that  case,  to 
speak  plainly,  even  a  Zeus  to  whom  his  worshippers  have  im- 
puted all  sorts  of  vicious,  human — only  too  human — traits  must 
be  a  historical  personality  because  it  cannot  be  otherwise  under- 
stood how  his  worshippers  could  have  ascribed  to  him  such 
human  traits.  Indeed  any  contradictory  trait  which  a  critic 
discovers  in  the  characters  of  a  dramatic  poem  must,  according 
to  the  requirements  of  Schmiedel's  method,  bring  him  to  the  view 
that  the  poet  cannot  have  been  inventing  here  but  must  have 
had  a  historical  model.  Or,  to  make  the  application  to  our 
own  case, — if  the  historicity  of  Jesus, — which,  however,  is  just 
the  thing  that  stands  in  question — did  not  stand  in  question,  then 
it  could  be  said  that  when  the  writer  who  deifies  Him,  never- 
theless adduces  human  traits,  there  the  historical  element  lies 
most  certainly  before  us;  but  historicity  can  and  may  never 
be  concluded  merely  from  the  fact  of  apparent  contradictions 
within  a  portrait  which  on  other  grounds  has  become  question- 
able, especially  when,  as  in  the  case  in  hand,  these  contradic- 
tions find  their  simplest  and  most  natural  explanation  in  the 
dogmatic  and  literary  peculiarity  of  the  sources."" 
Following  out  the  same  line  of  remark,  John  M.  Robert- 
son*^- directs  us  to  Grote's  famous  chapter  on  Greek 
myths,  and  cites  from  it  a  series  of  apt  sentences  in  which 
Grote  argues  that  no  trustworthy  historical  facts  can  be 
extracted  from  such  mythical  stories.  The  passage  ad- 
duced runs  in  its  entirety,  as  follows  :^^ 

"The  utmost  which  we  accomplish  by  means  of  the  semi-his- 
torical theory  even  in  its  most  successful  applications,  is,  that 
after  leaving  out  from  the  mythical  narrative  all  that  is  miracu- 
lous or  high-colored  or  extravagant,  we  arrive  at  a  series  of 
credible  incidents — incidents  which  may,  perhaps,  have  occurred, 

•*  Similarly  Arthur  Drews  (Die  Zeugnisse,  etc.,  p.  221 ;  E.  T.  p. 
152)  ;  "If  the  historicity  of  Jesus  was  othenvise  established,  then  it 
would  be  justifiable  to  conclude  from  the  presence  of  such  traits  to 
the  historical  tradition  which  the  author  could  not  evade."  On  this 
reasoning,  he  remarks,  we  could  prove  the  historicity  of  Heracles  from 
the  presence  in  his  legend  of  traits  which  accord  very  ill  with  the 
otherwise  noble  figure  of  this  hero. 

**  P.  230. 

"  George  Grote,  History  of  Greece,  American  reprint  of  the  second 
London  ed.,  1856,  i.,  p.  429  (Robertson  cites  London,  1888,  i.,  p.  382). 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  22/ 

and  against  which  no  intrinsic  presumption  can  be  raised.    This 
is  exactly  the  character  of  a  well-written  modern  novel  (as,  for 
example,  several  among  the  compositions  of  Defoe),  the  whole 
story  of  which  is  such  as  may  well  have  occurred  in  real  life; 
it  is  plausible  fiction  and  nothing  beyond.     To  raise  plausible 
fiction  up  to  the  superior  dignity  of  truth,  some  positive  testi- 
mony or  positive  ground  of  inference  must  be  shown;  even  the 
highest  measure  of  intrinsic  probability  is  not  alone  sufficient. 
A  man  who  tells  us  that,  on  the  day  of  the  battle  of  Plataea, 
rain  fell  on  the  spot  of  ground  where  the  city  of  New  York  now 
stands,  will  neither  deserve  nor  obtain  credit,  because  he  can 
have  had  no  means  of  positive  knowledge;  though  the  statement 
is  not  in  the  slightest  degree  improbable.     On  the  other  hand, 
statements  in  themselves  very  improbable  may  well  deserve  be- 
lief, provided  they  be  supported  by  sufficient  positive  evidence; 
thus  the  canal  dug  by  ord'er  of  Xerxes  across  the  promontory  of 
Mount  Athos,  and  the  sailing  of  the  Persian  fleet  through  it, 
is  a  fact  which  I  believe,  because  it  is  well  attested — notwith- 
standing its  remarkable  improbability,  which  so  far  misled  Juve- 
nal as  to  induce  him  to  single  out  the  narrative  as  a  glaring 
example  of  Grecian  mendacity." 
The  hinge  of  Grote's  position,  it  will  be  seen,  turns  on  the 
distinction  between  the  possible  and  the  actual,  the  credi- 
ble and  the  certified.     We  may  purge  a  narrative  of  im- 
possibilities and  not  make  a  single  step  towards  authenticat- 
ing it.     "The  narrative  ceases  to  be  incredible,  but  it  still 
remains  uncertified, — a  mere  commonplace  possibility."^* 
"By  the  aid  of  conjecture  we  get  out  of  the  impossible  and 
arrive  at  matters  intrinsically  plausible,  but  totally  uncerti- 
fied; beyond  this  point  we  cannot  penetrate  without  the 
light  of  extrinsic  evidence,  since  there  is  no  intrinsic  mark 
to  distinguish  truth  from  plausible  fiction. "^^     In  the  ab- 
sence of  positive  evidence  of  reality,  no  superior  intrinsic 
credibility  attaching  to  certain  events  above  others  in  the 
same  narrative  can  accredit  them  as  real. 

Schmiedel  has  fairly  laid  himself  open  to  a  rejoinder  of 
this  kind  by  his  reprehensible  dallying  with  the  suggestion 
that  Jesus  may  never  have  really  existed.  If  Heinrich 
Weinel  thinks  it  necessary  to  rebuke  the  levity  of  his 
Preface  to  W.  B.  Smith's  Der  vorchristliche  Jesiis,^^  what 

•*?.  431. 
«  P.  418- 
^Ist  das  "liberale"  Jesusbild  mderlegtf,  1910,  p.  13:     "It  was  not. 


328  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

shall  we  say  of  his  repeated  intimation  in  the  exposition 
of  his  method  of  criticism,  not  merely  that  the  real  existence 
of  Jesus  is  an  open  question,  but  even  that  it  is  a  question 
which  is  all  but  closed,  which  apart  from  the  "pillar-pas- 
sages" would  be  closed,  in  an  adverse  sense?  To  say  that 
"if  passages  of  this  kind  were  wholly  wanting  in  them,  it 
would  be  impossible  to  prove  to  a  sceptic  that  any  historical 
value  whatever  was  to  be  assigned  to  the  Gospels ;  he  would 
be  in  a  position  to  declare  the  picture  of  Jesus  contained  in 
them  to  be  purely  a  work  of  phantasy  and  could  remove  the 
person  of  Jesus  from  the  field  of  history  ;"^^  or  even,  as  it 
is  elsewhere  perhaps  not  quite  so  strongly  put,®^  that  "if 
they  were  wholly  wanting  in  them,  it  would  be  difficult 
to  withstand  the  allegation  that  the  Gospels  everywhere 
give  us  only  a  sacred  image  painted  on  a  gold  ground,  and 
we  could  therefore  not  at  all  know  what  kind  of  an  appear- 
ance Jesus  really  made,  if  not  indeed  even  whether  He  ever 
existed  at  all;" — is  of  course  mere  fustian:  nobody  knows 
better  than  Schmiedel  that  even  were  there  no  Gospels 
at  all  the  actual  existence  of  Jesus  would  be  exceptionally 
attested  and  altogether  beyond  question.  But  the  effect  of 
permitting  himself  to  give  utterance  to  such  inconsiderate 
assertions  is  to  hand  himself  over  bound  hand  and  foot 
to  his  enemies.  He  has  treated  the  whole  tradition  of 
Jesus  as  if  it  were  pure  myth,  and  has  represented  the  task 
of  the  historian  to  be  to  seek  out  and  isolate  the  kernel  of 
fact  which  lies  at  the  center  of  this  myth.  It  is  open  to 
anyone  to  rejoin  that  this  task  is  hopeless;  that  on  this 

however,  a  merely  tactical  blunder  in  Schmiedel,  to  write  for  the 
German  translation  of  Smith  a  Preface  in  which  he  not  only  main- 
tained that  it  is  not  easy  to  refute  Smith,  but  further  that  Smith's 
learning  is  'by  no  means  at  the  disposal  of  every  one  who  works  after 
a  strictly  scientific  fashion';  and  in  which  he  speaks  of  the  'art  of 
his  scientific  method.'  This  is  simply  untruth.  And  Schmiedel  only 
gets  what  he  deserves,  when,  despite  his  protestation  that  he  does 
not  think  anything  in  Smith's  construction  right,  he  is  everywhere 
invoked  as  compurgator — after  allowance  for  the  'theological  ara- 
besque.' " 

"  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881. 

*^  Das  vierte  Evangelium,  etc.,  p.  17. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES"         229 

pathway  we  can  reach  only  the  plausible,  not  the  attested, 
while  it  is  only  the  attested  that  can  claim  to  be  the  actual. 
It  is  ineffective  to  urge  in  rebuttal  that  the  statements  ap- 
pealed to  do  not  range  with  the  merely  "credible"  elements 
which  are  selected  out  from  the  body  of  the  myth  by  those 
whom  Grote  speaks  of  as  advocates  of  "the  semi-historical 
theory,"  but  have  the  peculiarity  that  they  could  not  have 
been  invented  by  the  framers  of  the  myth,  because  they  are 
inconsistent  with  its  whole  substance  and  must  therefore 
have  been  carried  over  unchanged  from  the  pre-mythical 
tradition.  It  is  easy  to  rejoin  (with  W.  B.  Smith)  that 
an  impossibility  is  attempted  here;  that  no  limits  can  be 
set  to  the  invention  of  man;  and  it  is  equally  easy  to  point 
out  (reverting  to  Grote)  that  what  is  here  claimed  as  a 
peculiarity  of  the  "pillar-passages"  is  a  common  phenome- 
non in  all  divine  myths.  In  them  all  express  inconsistencies 
abound  and  in  the  nature  of  the  case  must  abound,  since 
human  invention  is  incompetent  to  the  task  of  consistently 
dramatizing  deity.  Let  a  poet  be  of  the  highest  genius  and 
do  his  utmost  to  realize  his  picture  of  the  divine  actor  he  is 
depicting:  "If  he  does  not  consistently  succeed  in  it  the 
reason  is  because  consistency  in  such  a  matter  is  unattain- 
able, since  after  all,  the  analogies  of  common  humanity,  the 
only  materials  with  which  the  most  creative  imagination 
has  to  work  upon,  obtrude  themselves  involuntarily  and 
the  lineaments  of  the  man  are  thus  seen  even  under  a  dress 
which  promises  superhuman  proportions."^®  And  what  the 
most  supreme  art  must  fail  in — how  can  we  attribute  that 
to  the  blind  working  of  the  mythopoeic  fancy?  But  above 
all  it  is  pertinent  to  rejoin  that  thus  the  whole  ground  of 
the  argument  has  been  shifted.  It  was  assumed  that  the 
entire  story  of  Jesus  is  mythical,  and  it  was  represented 
that  unless  some  kernel  of  truth  could  be  found  embedded 
in  this  myth  the  historicity  of  Jesus  could  scarcely  be  de- 
,fended.  It  is  now  assumed  that  the  story  of  Jesus  is, 
rather,  essentially  history.    We  are  in  effect  betrayed  into 


"History  of  Greece,  i.,  p.  385- 


230  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

a  vicious  circle  of  reasoning :  and  we  assign  an  underlying 
reality  to  statements  like  those  contained  in  the  "pillar- 
passages"  only  because  we  have  from  the  beginning  as- 
sumed that  a  reality  lay  behind  our  so-called  myth  and  our 
task  was  merely  to  ascertain  its  nature.  If  there  exists  in- 
deed good  reason,  extraneous  to  the  myth  itself  which  we 
are  investigating,  to  believe  in  the  actual  existence  of  the 
hero  it  celebrates,  why  undoubtedly  cadit  quaestio.  "Grote," 
even  Robertson  tells  us,'^'^  "never  argued  that  history  proper, 
the  record  of  a  time  by  those  who  lived  in  it,  is  to  be  so 
tried;  and  he  constantly  accepts  narratives  which  might 
conceivably  be  plausible  fictions, — nay,  he  occasionally  ac- 
cepts tales  which  appear  to  some  of  us  to  be  fictions.  It 
is  when  we  are  dealing  with  myths  that  he  denies  our  power 
to  discriminate;  in  history  proper  he  undertakes — at  times 
too  confidently — to  discriminate."  We  must  really  settle 
in  our  minds  whether  we  are  dealing  with  myth  in  which 
there  may  possibly  be  embedded  some  historical  kernel,  or 
with  history  which  may  possibly  be  encrusted  with  some 
mythical  adornments,  before  we  can  profitably  proceed  with 
our  criticism. 

It  is  not  worth  our  while  to  pause  here  to  inquire  into  the 
justice  of  the  extreme  attitude  taken  up  by  Grote  with  ref- 
erence to  the  possibility  of  extracting  matters  of  fact  from 
pure  myths  without  the  aid  of  extrinsic  attestation.'''^    This, 

"  P.  232. 

"  Grote  himself  tells  us  (pp.  408-9  note)  that  exception  was  already 
taken  to  the  extremity  of  his  views  as  well  by  an  able  article  in  The 
Quarterly  Reinew  for  October,  1846  (what  is  meant  is  No.  civ.  pp. 
113  fif)  as  by  Professor  Kortiim  writing  in  the  Heidelberger  Jahr- 
bucher  der  Literatur  for  1846.  The  former  contended  that  "the  myth- 
opoeic  faculty  of  the  human  mind,  though  essentially  loose  and  un- 
trustworthy, is  never  creative,  but  requires  some  basis  of  fact  to 
work  upon;"  the  latter  similarly  that  the  myths  always  contain  "real 
matter  of  fact  along  with  mere  conceptions."  Grote  responds  that  this 
may  very  well  be;  all  that  he  asserts  is  that  apart  from  extrinsic  at- 
testation we  are  without  criteria  for  singling  out  the  matters  of  fact. 
Robertson  refers  us  to  the  criticism  of  Grotei's  position  by  Sir  Alfred 
C.  Lyall  in  his  Asiatic  Studies,  First  Series,  ed.  2,  1884,  p.  30  ff;  see 
also  Second  Series,  1899,  pp.  324  ff.  The  difference  between  Grote 
and  Lyall  seems  to  reduce  actually  to  something  like  this :     Whether 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES"         23 1 

at  the  moment,  not  merely  because  of  the  absurdity  of  treat- 
ing the  tradition  of  Jesus  as  if  it  were  pure  myth.  But 
because  of  the  absurdity  of  the  proposal  to  treat  it  as  if  it 
were  pure  myth  coming  from  Schmiedel.  For  despite  this 
implication  of  his  suggestion  Schmiedel  does  not  really 
believe  that  the  historicity  of  the  Jesus  whose  figure  is 
presented  to  us  in  the  Gospel  narratives  is  without  sufficient 
attestation  apart  from  the  Gospels  to  render  it  indisputable. 
He  may  minimize  the  amount  and  force  of  this  attestation, 
speaking,  for  example,  of  ''the  meagreness  of  the  historical 
testimony  regarding  Him,  whether  in  canonical  writings 
outside  the  Gospels,  or  in  profane  writers,  such  as  Josephus, 
Tacitus,  Suetonius  and  Pliny. "'^^  But  this  is  only  part  of 
the  attempt  to  give  an  external  appearance  of  propriety  to 
his  dealing  with  the  tradition  of  Jesus  as  if  it  were,  if  not 
pure  myth,  yet  at  least  almost  pure  myth;  and  it  does  not 
in  point  of  fact  even  so  far  fairly  represent  his  own  point 
of  view.  The  plain  fact  is  that  Schmiedel  comes  to  the 
Gospel  narratives  with  the  historicity  of  Jesus  already  im- 
movably established  on  extrinsic  grounds,  and  therefore 
cannot  properly  represent  the  historicity  of  Jesus  as  in  any 
sense  dependent  on  his  jDOwer  to  separate  out  from  those 
narratives  on  intrinsic  grounds  items  of  information  about 
Jesus  which  cannot  in  the  nature  of  the  case  be  their  in- 
vention. Whatever  we  may  think  of  the  validity  of  the 
argument  that  the  presence  of  such  statements  in  such  a 


myths  are  ordinarily  a  specific  product  of  imagination  and  feeling 
distinct  in  kind  from  both  history  and  philosophy  (as  Grote  contends), 
or  concretions  gathered  around  a  nucleus  of  fact  (as  Lyall  contends). 
In  the  former  case  they  are  fundamentally  fictions  and  plausibility  in 
their  contents  is  no  evidence  of  reality.  In  the  latter,  they  are  funda- 
mentally history,  however  bad  history,  and  the  kernel  of  fact  in  them 
may  be  sought  and  conceivably  found.  The  difference  is,  however, 
only  relative;  and  the  real  crux  is,  as  Grote  insists.  Granted  that  there 
is  a  kernel  of  truth  in  myths,  how  are  we  going  to  get  at  it?  The 
Quarterly  Reviewer  confesses:  "We  pretend  to  no  key  by  which 
we  can  extract  the  history  from  the  legend"  (p.  119)  and  Sir  Alfred 
C.  Lyall  suggests  none. 

''  Encyclopacdui  Biblica,  col.  1881,  cf.  Preface  to  Neumann,  pp.  vii., 
viii. ;  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  14. 


232  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

narrative  can  be  accounted  for  only  by  the  imposition  of 
them  upon  it  by  primitive  tradition,  so  that  they  must  be 
recognized  as  preserving  fragments  of  historical  truth,  in 
the  actual  case  before  us  this  argument  can  possess  only 
corroborative  value  with  reference  to  the  historicity  of 
Jesus,  and  acquires  primary  importance  only  with  reference 
to  the  character  of  the  historical  Jesus  already  given.  It 
is  nothing  less  than  a  reprehensible  misrepresentation  of  the 
state  of  the  case  to  endeavor  to  convey  an  impression  that 
the  recognition  of  the  historicity  of  Jesus  is  in  any  sense 
dependent  on  this  argument.  In  point  of  fact  no  one  is 
more  assured  than  Schmiedel  that  it  is  quite  firmly  estab- 
lished altogether  apart  from  this  argument. 

Even  when  we  have  settled  it  well  in  our  minds,  how- 
ever, that  we  have  to  do  in  the  Gospel  narratives,  not  with 
a  myth  in  which  we  may  hope  to  find,  perhaps,  some  relics 
of  tradition,  but  fundamentally  with  historical  tradition,  we 
have  not  yet  escaped  from  misleading  suggestions  of  the 
state  of  the  case.  Schmiedel  is  very  eager  to  have  it  under- 
stood that  the  critical  procedure  he  proposes  is  the  common 
method  of  historians.  "Every  historical  investigator,"  he 
tells  us,  therefore,  in  commending  it  to  us,'^^  "in  what  field 
soever  he  may  be  working,  follows  the  principle  of  hold- 
ing for  true,  in  the  first  rank,  in  any  account  which  testifies 
to  reverence  for  its  hero,  that  which  runs  counter  to  this 
reverence,  since  that  cannot  rest  on  invention."  The  broad 
generality  of  this  representation  is  not,  however,  always 
retained.  Sometimes  the  suggestion  is  rather  that  it  is 
only  when  the  historian  "makes  his  first  acquaintance  with 
a  historical  person  from  a  book  which  is  pervaded  by  rever- 
ence for  its  hero  as  the  Gospels  are  for  Jesus,"  that  "he 
places  in  the  first  rank  of  credibility  those  passages  of  the 
book  which  run  counter  to  this  reverence. "''^^  Sometimes 
indeed,  as  in  the  primary  statement, '^^  we  are  carried  into 
an  even  narrower  sphere,  and  actually  read :     "When  a 

""Das  vierte  Evangelium,  pp.  16-17. 

''*  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  16  (German  edition,  p.  6). 

"^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1872. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  233 

profane  historian  finds  before  him  a  historical  document 
which  testifies  to  the  worship  of  a  hero  unknown  to  other 
sources,  he  attributes  first  and  foremost  importance  to  those 
features  which  cannot  be  deduced  merely  from  the  fact  of 
this  worship,  and  he  does  so  on  the  simple  and  sufficient 
ground  that  they  would  not  be  found  in  this  source  unless 
the  author  had  met  with  them  as  fixed  data  of  tradition." 
It  is  amazing  to  read  here  farther :  "The  same  fundamental 
ciple  may  safely  be  applied  in  the  case  of  the  Gospels,  for 
they  also  are  all  of  them  written  by  worshippers  of  Jesus.'' 
We  get  further  and  further  from  the  actual  state  of  the 
case  with  the  narratives  of  the  Gospels,  of  course,  as  each 
of  these  limitations  is  added.  Nobody  first  learns  of  Jesus 
from  the  Gospel  narratives.  To  suggest  that  Jesus  is  "un- 
known to  other  sources"  than  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  or  that 
these  Gospels  may  be  treated  as  if  they  were  a  single  docu- 
ment, fairly  attains  the  absurd.  If  an  analogy  to  the  critical 
method  which  Schmiedel  recommends  us  to  apply  to  the 
Gospels  can  be  found  in  the  practice  of  "every  historical 
investigator  in  the  extra-theological  field"  only  in  such  dis- 
similar cases  as  are  here  indicated, — why,  then,  there  is  no 
analogy.  The  appearance  is  very  strong  that  Schmiedel, 
wishing  to  appeal  to  the  example  of  secular  historians  in 
support  of  the  critical  method  he  is  propounding,  and  finding 
among  them  no  exact  analogies,  except  in  the  very  specific 
case  which  he  alludes  to,  vacillates  between  simply  claiming 
the  example  of  secular  historians  in  general,  and  assigning 
the  case  of  the  Gospel  narratives  to  the  obviously  unsuit- 
able category  in  which  he  finds  in  practice  the  closest  an- 
alogy to  his  proposed  critical  method. 

The  question  having  thus  been  raised  it  may  be  inter- 
esting to  inquire  what  established  methods  of  research  are 
in  use  among  historians  in  general  which  may  be  thought 
to  present  analogies  more  or  less  close  with  the  manner 
of  dealing  with  the  Gospel  narratives  proposed  by  Schmie- 
del. Anything  like  close  analogies  we  shall,  of  course,  find 
only  among  the  methods  which  have  been  devised  for  as- 


234  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

certaining  what  may  be  regarded  as  trustworthy  in  generally 
untrustworthy  accounts,  or,  to  put  it  baldly,  for  eliciting 
the  truth  from  the  accounts  of  partizan  writers.  The  funda- 
mental presupposition  of  Schmiedel's  criticism — as  indeed 
of  the  whole  ''Liberal"  criticism — is  that  we  have  to  do  in 
the  historical  tradition  of  Jesus  with  intensely  partizan  re- 
ports. The  entire  tradition  is  the  product,  in  Schmiedel's 
phrase,  of  "worshippers  of  Jesus,"  and  has  consequently 
been  cast  in  the  moulds  of  their  worship  of  Jesus;  in  the 
phrase  of  the  common  "Liberal"  criticism  it  is  the  work 
of  the  primitive  Christian  community  and  reflects  at  every 
point  the  beliefs  of  that  community.  How,  then,  do  the 
methodologists  deal  with  bias?  Ernst  Bernheim  describes 
the  general  procedure  as  follows  i''^ 

"We  must  keep  clearly  in  view  with  what  particular  circle  an 
author  has  more  or  less  personal  relations,  of  what  nation,  of 
what  station  he  is,  whether  he  belongs  to  a  particular  political 
or  confessional  party,  whether  he  is  a  one-sided  patriot,  whether 
he  has  had  part  in  the  determining  of  the  events  which  he  de- 
scribes, whether  he  gives  accounts  of  personal  enemies  or  friends. 
In  all  these  relations  there  can  lie  reasons,  on  the  one  side,  for 
keeping  silence  as  to,  or  smoothing  over,  what  is  obnoxious,  for 
immoderately  emphasizing  and  praising  what  is  congenial ;  on 
the  other  side  for  ignoring  what  is  meritorious  and  emphasizing 
what  is  obnoxious.  The  statements  of  a  writer  who  is  involved 
in  such  relations,  cannot  be  taken  as  absolute  matters  of  fact, 
without  some  testing,  so  far  as  they  may  be  affected  by  these 
relations ;  and  the  old  methodologists  already  emphasize  strongly 
enough  that  a  partizan  writer  deserves  unqualified  credit  only 
when  he  relates  what  is  good  of  his  enemies,  what  is  preju- 
dicial of  his  friends,  fellow-partizans,  compatriots." 
Accordingly,  a  little  later,  speaking  of  the  possibility  of  ex- 
tracting trustworthy  facts  out  of  an  untrustworthy  narra- 
tive he  writes  ■.'^'^ 

"It  is  especially  to  be  observed  that  there  often  meet  us,  in 
the  midst  of  untrustworthy  communications,  statements  which, 
precisely  in  these  surroundings,  we  may  hold  to  be  unqualifiedly 
trustworthy :  to  wit,  when  an  author  who  is  governed  by  distinctly 
marked  interests  or  tendencies,  adduces  facts,  passes  judgments, 
which  stand  in   contradiction   with  his   tendency,   since  he  here 

'"  Lehrbuch   der   historischen   Methode,'   igoS,   p.   509;   cf.   pp.  485-6, 
492-3. 
"  P.  523. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEl's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         235 

involuntarily  pays  homage  to  the  pure  truth,  and  does  not  ob- 
serve,  or   at   least   does   not   heed,   the   contradiction   with   his 
tendency, — as   in   the  case   of  admissions   of   defeats,  blunders, 
weaknesses  of  his  own  party,  or  on  the  other  hand  in  the  case 
of  communication  of  victories,  services,  virtues  of  the  enemy. 
The  testimony  of  Lambert  of  Hersfeld,   for  example,  must  be 
taken  as  altogether  trustworthy  when,   in  involuntary   recogni- 
tion, he   relates  individual  honorable  traits   of   Henry  IV,   be- 
cause   Lambert    is    animated    throughout    by    a    strong    enmity 
to  the  King.     We  can  generalize  this  observation  to  the  effect 
that    statements   in   general,    which   have    a    content    obnoxious 
for  the  communicator  and  his  personal  interests — obnoxious,  that 
is  to  say,  not  according  to  our  opinion,  but  in  his  own  view — 
are  thoroughly  trustworthy;  for,  if  it  is  already  for  most  men 
difficult  to  communicate  truths  which  are  unfavorable  to  them- 
selves and  those  associated  with  them,  it  runs  entirely  counter 
to  human  nature  falsely  to  set  itself  in  an  unfavorable  light." 
To  the  important  qualifying  clause,  "obnoxious,  that  is  to 
say,  not  according  to  our  opinions,  but  in  his  own  sense," 
Bernheim  attaches  a  note  which  tells  us  that  Charles  Seigno- 
bos,  "has  rightly  emphasized  this,"  in  the  Introduction  aux 
etudes  historiques  which  he  published  in  collaboration  with 
Langlois.''^^    In  the  passage  referred  to,  Seignobos  is  point- 
ing out  the  kinds  of  statements  which,  occurring  in  histori- 
cal documents,  authenticate  themselves.   Thus,  for  instance, 
he  tells  us,'^  bona  fides  at  least  may  be  inferred  when  "the 
fact  stated  is  manifestly  prejudicial  to  the  effect  which  the 
author  wishes  to  produce."     "In  such  a  case,"  he  remarks 
"there  is  a  probability  of  good  faith."     But  we  must  take 
good  care  to  reach  our  judgments  in  such  matters  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  writer,  not  our  own.     "It  is  quite 
possible  that  the  author's  notions  of  his  interest  or  honour 
were  very  different   from  ours."     We  need  not  accredit 
good  faith  to  Charles  IX,  for  example,  when  he  acknowl- 
edged  that  he   was   responsible    for  the  massacre   of    St. 
Bartholomew's   day;  to  us  that  would  be  to  confess   an 
infamy,  to  him  it  was  a  boast  of  glory.     There  are  even 
cases,  Seignobos  proceeds  to  intimate,  in  which  more  than 
bona  fides,' — in  which  truth  itself — may  be  inferred,  viz. 


1898,  p.  158. 

^Introduction  to  the  Studv  of  History,  ii.  T.,  1908,  p.  186. 


236  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

when  "the  fact  was  of  such  a  nature,  that  it  could  not  have 
been  stated  unless  it  were  true."^*^ 

"A  man  does  not  declare  that  he  has  seen  something  contrary 
to  his  expectations  and  habits  of  mind  unless  observation  has 
compelled  him  to  admit  it.     A  fact  which  seems  very  improb- 
able to  the  man  who  relates  it  has  a  good  chance  of  being  true. 
We  have  then  to  ask  whether  the  fact  stated  was  in  contradic- 
tion to  the  author's  opinions,  whether  it  is  a  phenomenon  of 
a  kind  unknown  to  him,  an  action  or  a  custom  which  seems 
unintelligible    to    him;    whether    it    is    a    saying    whose    import 
transcends   his   intelligence,   such   as   the   sayings   of   Christ   re- 
ported in  the  Gospels,  or  the  answers  made  by  Joan  of  Arc  to 
questions  put  to  her  in  the  course  of  her  trial." 
And  then  the  caution  is  again  added  that  in  all  such  cases 
we  must  be  very  careful  to  judge  according  to  the  ideas 
of  the  author,  not  our  own. 

That  the  whole  case  may  be  before  us  we  append  an  ad- 
ditional citation  from  another  writer  on  general  historical 
method.    H.  B.  George  remarks  :^^ 

"If  a  particular  writer  is  our  only  authority  for  this  or  that 
matter,  concerning  which  his  sentiments  are  obvious,  it  is  in- 
evitable that  we  should  feel  a  tinge  of  prima  facie  suspicion  that 
the  facts  may  not  be  fairly  represented.  Our  belief  in  his  state- 
ment will  not  be  quite  so  confident  as  if  there  were  separate 
and  independent  testimony  in  support  of  it,  but  we  have  no 
ground  for  carrying  our  mistrust  further.  In  such  a  case,  as 
continually  when  dealing  with  historical  evidence,  we  must  be 
content  with  something  short  of  unhesitating  conviction."  "In- 
ternal criticism  may  indeed  suggest  that  the  author  was  a 
partizan,  and  in  general  knowledge  that  partizanship  is  liable 
to  lead  authors  into  misrepresenting  facts  may  reasonably  render 
us  suspicious;  but  no  merely  internal  indications  could  justify 
our  totally  disbelieving  the  author's  specific  statements  on  a 
matter  concerning  which,  ex  hypothesi,  we  have  no  evidence  but 
his."  "The  most  bigoted  partizan  may  be  giving  a  thoroughly 
true  account  of  a  transaction  which  is  of  special  importance  to 
the  cause  that  he  favors;  the  most  credulous  of  writers  may 
be  telling  a  palpably  true  story,  even  if  it  sounds  improbable." 
The  principles  of  procedure  outlined  in  passages  like 
these  are  in  general  those  which  Schmiedel  wishes  to  in- 
voke in  his  criticism  of  the  Gospel  narratives.  We  could 
almost  conjecture  that  he  wrote  with  the  very  words  of 


'"P.  188. 

'^Historical  Ezndence,  1909,  pp.  84,  96,  95. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S  "PILLAR-PASSAGES"         237 

Bernheim  in  his  mind.  Nevertheless  a  different  spirit 
breathes  in  them  from  that  which  animates  his  procedure. 
And  in  attempting  to  apply  such  principles  to  the  criticism 
of  the  Gospel  narratives,  he  has  been  misled  into  a  num- 
ber of  violences  in  dealing  with  his  material. 

In  the  first  place,  there  is  the  flagrant  absurdity,  of  which 
something  has  already  been  said,  of  suggesting  that  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  may  be  treated  as  the  sole  source  of  our 
knowledge  of  Jesus.  The  evidence,  not  merely  of  the 
existence  of  Jesus,  but  of  the  manner  of  man  he  was,  quite 
independent  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  is  altogether  excep- 
tional, as  well  in  consistency  and  contemporaneousness,  as 
in  sheer  amount.  This  evidence  culminates,  of  course, 
in  the  testimony  of  Paul,  though  it  is  by  no  means  con- 
fined to  his  testimony.  Schmiedel,  it  is  true,  minifies  the 
testimony  of  Paul;  but  he  cannot  deny  it,  much  less  can 
he  evacuate  it.  It  only  betrays  the  exigencies  of  his  po- 
sition when  he  permits  himself  to  speak  regarding  it  in 
such  studiedly  disparaging  terms  as  these  :^- 

"If,  as  Dr.  Neumann  and  the  present  writer  believe,  it  is  pos- 
sible to  show  that  the  genuineness  of  these  Epistles" — the  major 
Epistles  of  Paul — "is  unassailable,  and  that  the  figure  of  Jesus 
cannot  be  projected  back  into  a  period  earlier  than  the  Chris- 
tian era,  we  shall  be  justified  in  regarding  the  existence  of  Jesus 
as  historically  established.  Only,  by  this  we  have  gained  ex- 
ceedingly little  for  the  construction  of  a  Life  of  Jesus;  the  num- 
ber of  data  supplied  by  Paul  is  but  small."*' 

"With  reference  to  the  Epistles  of  the  Apostle  Paul,  which  no 
doubt   unquestionably   presuppose   an    actual   Jesus,   appeal   can 
be  made  to  the  fact  that  according  to  many  investigators  they 
all   came  into  being   only   in  the   second  century.     And   if  the 
composition  of  the  most  important  of  them  be  assigned  to  the 
years  50-60  A.D.,— which  is  my  view  also— nevertheless  it  must  be 
acknowledged  that  they  relate  deplorably  little  about  Jesus,  and 
do  not  in  the  least  afiford  a  guarantee  for  all  that  is  commonly 
regarded  as  credible  about  him  from  the  first  three  Gospels."" 
If  it  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  question  at  issue  does  not 
concern  the  details  of  the  daily  life  of  Jesus,  but  His  very 
existence  and  the  manner  of  person  He  was,  the  unhappy 
"C/.  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881. 
'"Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  viii. 
**  Die  Person  Jesu  etc..  p.  6 ;  E.  T.  p.  14. 


238  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

art  of  these  statements  will  be  apparent.  Much  more  justly 
Heinrich  Weinel  not  only  tells  us  that  Paul's  letters  "con- 
tain so  much  about  Jesus  that  he  is  our  best  and  surest 
witness  in  the  controversy  that  has  just  been  started  afresh 
about  the  historicity  of  the  person  of  Jesus,"  and  that,  how- 
ever few  references  he  makes  to  events  in  His  life,  Paul  has 
yet  "preserved  the  picture  of  Jesus  for  us  very  clearly  and 
distinctly,"^^  but,  addressing  himself  to  the  precise  point 
now  engaging  our  attention,  says  plainly  :^^ 

"The  critical  theology  has  continually  emphasized  how  little 
we  learn  of  Jesus  from  Paul.  I  too  myself  have  formerly  placed 
the  matter  in  this  false  light.  What  Paul  gives  us  of  Jesus  and 
His  words  is  little,  if  we  measure  it  by  the  standard  of  a 
Gospel ;  it  is  little  too  if  we  demand  that  a  Paul  shall  buttress 
all  his  ideas  with  declarations  of  Jesus.  It  is,  however,  not 
merely  enough  to  find  the  existence  of  Jesus  attested  in  the  Epis- 
tles of  Paul ;  rather  in  all  important  matters  the  echoes  of  Jesus' 
sayings  are  heard  in  Paul,  and  there  is  not  only  a  whole  multi- 
tude of  details  which  Paul  knows  and  transmits,  but  also  all  the 
distinguishing  traits  of  the  preaching  of  Jesus  and  His  na- 
ture are  preserved  to  us  by  Paul.  There  is  therefore  a  great 
deal,  if  we  do  not  carry  the  old  prejudice  with  us  to  these 
Epistles  which  are  after  all  occasional  writings  and  are  not 
written  with  the  express  design  of  informing  us  of  Jesus." 

Even  Schmiedel's  own  pupil,  Arno  Neumann,  indeed,  re- 
bukes the  madness  of  his  teacher,  when,  in  the  Introduction 
to  the  little  Life  of  Jesus,  to  the  English  translation  of 
which  Schmiedel  contributed  a  Preface,  coming  to  speak 
of  Paul's  testimony  to  Jesus,  he  tells  us  that  to  give  any 
scientific  character  to  the  denial  of  Jesus'  existence,  we 
must  first  push  incontinently  out  of  the  path  that  "historical 
Rock  whose  name  is  Paul."  By  Paul,  the  genuineness  of 
whose  chief  Epistles  is  indubitable,  he  adds,^'^ 

"there  are  accredited  not  only  the  manifestation  (Auftreten)  of 
Jesus  Christ  in  general.  His  epoch,  the  peculiarity  of  His  char- 
acter, and  His  death,  but  also  some  of  His  fundamental  ideas. 
His  twelve  disciples,  and  the  remarkable  impression  He  must 
have  made," — 

in  a  word,  the  entire  fact  and  figure  of  Jesus.    But  that  the 
^St.  Paul,  the  Man  and  his  Work.     E.  T.,  1906,  pp.  316,  321:  the 

whole  passage  should  be  read. 
^  1st  das  "liberale"  Jesusbild  widerlegt?     1910,  p.  16. 
'^  Jesus,  zuer  er  gcschichtlich  zmr,  1904.  pp.  lo-ii;  E.  T.  pp.  4-5. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         239 

force  of  Paul's  testimony  may  be  fully  appreciated  it  must 
be  kept  in  mind  that  it  is  original  testimony,  properly  so- 
called  contemporaneous  testimony. ^^  Paul,  it  is  true,  was 
not  himself  a  companion  of  Jesus;  but  he  connected  him- 
self with  the  Christian  movement  in  its  very  earliest  days, 
lived  in  constant  communication  with  Jesus'  immediate 
disciples,  enjoyed  the  fullest  opportunity  to  learn  at  first 
hand  all  they  knew,  and  wrote  under  their  eye.^^  In  a 
true  sense  his  testimony  is  theirs ;  he  is  in  it  their  mouth- 
piece; and  it  is  accordingly  supported  in  all  its  extent  by 
every  line  of  tradition  which  comes  down  from  them.^° 

The  absurdity  of  treating  the  Synoptic  Gospels  as  the 
sole  source  of  our  knowledge  of  Jesus  is  fairly  matched  by 
the  absurdity  of  attempting  to  treat  them  as  together  con- 
stituting but  a  single  source  of  that  knowledge,  and  that 
a  source  of  the  value  of  which  we  are  ignorant.  Schmie- 
del  warns  us  not  to  imagine  that  a  narrative  which  is 
found  in  all  three  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  comes  to  us 


^  "Original  authorities,"  according  to  Bernheim  (pp.  413-507)  are 
strictly  only  actual  eye-and-ear-witnesses  of  what  is  narrated.  But  as 
even  these  must  fill  out  what  they  relate  from  the  testimony  of 
others,  it  is  usual  to  widen  the  notion  and  to  call  "contemporary  ac- 
counts which  rest  on  their  own  immediate  perception  and  on  that  of 
other  contemporaries"  "original  authorities.*'  This  is  reasonable. 
On  the  other  hand,  E.  A.  Freeman  (The  Methods  of  Historical  Study, 
1886,  p.  168)  unduly  extends  the  notion  when  he  accords  the  name  of 
"original  authorities"  to  derived  accounts  in  case  the  original  sources 
are  lost.  To  deserve  the  name  of  "original  authorities"  the  element 
of  contemporaneousness  must  not  be  wholly  lacking. 

''Accordingly  Neumann  adds  (p.  11;  E.  T.  p.  5)  :  "It  is  accordingly 
no  impairment  of  the  value  of  Paul  as  reporter  that  he  never  per- 
sonally saw  Jesus ;  for  certainly  there  was  nothing  left  lacking  to 
this  new  convert  of  the  most  eager  inquiries  (i  Cor.  xi.  23;  vii.  10  ff; 
2  Cor.  X.  18  fif)." 

"Out  of  the  immense  literature  of  the  subject,  cf.  especially:  R.  J. 
Knowling,  The  Testimony  of  St.  Paul  to  Christ,  1905 :  Th.  Zahn,  Einleit- 
ung  in  das  N.  T}  I.  pp.  164  fif  (ix.  §  48,  Anmerkungen  4,  s)  ;  R. 
Drescher,  Das  Leben  Jesu  bei  Paulus,  1900;  H.  J.  Holtzmann,  in 
Die  Christliche  Welt  xxiv.  (1910),  col.  151 -160;  A.  J.  Mason  Cam- 
bridge Theological  Studies,  edited  by  H.  B.  Swete,  1905,  PP-  425  ff; 
J.  G.  Machen,  Princeton.  Biblical  and  Theological  Studies,  1912,  pp. 
S6i  ff. 


240  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

therefore  accredited  by  three  witnesses;  for,  says  he,  "all 
are  drawing  from  one  source. "^^  But  he  does  not  take 
the  same  trouble  to  warn  us  that  this  one  source  lies,  there- 
fore, distinctly  nearer  to  the  events  it  narrates  than  any  of 
the  three  Gospels  that  have  drawn  from  it;  or  that  the 
circumstance  that  they  have  all  drawn  so  largely  from  it 
accredits  it  as  a  very  excellent  source,  everywhere  depend- 
ed upon  in  its  own  day;  or,  even,  that  it  is  not  the  only 
source  from  which  these  Gospels  draw, — that  by  its  side 
lies  another  source,  certainly  equal  in  age  and  value  to  it, 
from  which  two  of  them  at  least  draw,  and  by  their  side 
lie  still  other  sources  from  which  one  or  another  of  them 
draws,  which  need  not  be  inferior  in  either  age  or  value 
to  either  of  them.  If  we  are  to  break  up  the  Gospels  into 
their  sources  and  appeal  rather  to  these  sources  than  to  the 
Gospels  themselves  (which  is  -not  the  method  of  procedure 
which  Schmiedel  is  in  act  to  commend  to  us,  presenting  his 
critical  method  rather  as  independent  of  literary  criticism) 
we  do  not  lose  but  profit  by  the  process.  Instead  of  three 
witnesses  of  about  the  seventh  decade  of  the  century  we 
have  now  in  view  quite  a  number  of  witnesses,  all  earlier 
than  the  seventh  decade  of  the  century,  some  of  them  per- 
haps very  much  earlier;  and  all  commended  to  our  favor- 
able consideration  by  their  selection  as  trustworthy  sources 
of  information  concerning  Jesus  by  writers  so  earnest  and 
careful  as  the  authors  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  and  by 
the  remarkable  completeness  of  their  harmony  with  one 
another  in  the  portrait  of  Jesus  which  they  draw,  a  har- 
mony which  extends  also  to  the  portrait  of  Jesus  given  us 
by  Paul  and  by  all  other  witnesses  which  we  may  be  will- 
ing to  accept  as  coming  to  us  from  the  same  general  period. 
No  fault  in  the  historical  criticism  of  the  Gospel  narratives 
could  be  more  gross  than  the  obscuring  of  the  existence  or 
of  the  impressiveness  of  this  consistent  tradition  concern- 
ing Jesus,  stretching  back  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  to  the 
very  beginning  of  the  Christian  movement.     And  nothing 

"  Encyclopaedia  Siblica,  col.   1872, 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"        24I 

requires  to  be  more  strongly  emphasized  than  that  it  is 
just  because  of  the  impressive  consent  of  the  whole  tra- 
dition of  Jesus,  running  back  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  to 
the  beginning,  that  critics  whose  presuppositions  will  not 
permit  them  to  accept  this  tradition  as  trustworthy  appeal 
from  literary  criticism  to  historical  criticism  in  an  en- 
deavor to  get  behind  the  consistent  tradition  to  a  Jesus  un- 
known to  it.  The  Synoptic  Gospels  come  before  us,  mean- 
while, not  as  new  phenomena  relatively  to  the  portrait  o£ 
Jesus  which  they  embody,  but  distinctly  as  merely  the 
bearers  of  a  tradition  of  the  richest  and  most  consistent 
sort,  which  from  all  that  appears  is  aboriginal ;  in  a  word, 
as  witnesses  of  really  contemporaneous  value  to  the  Jesus 
who  was  known  by  those  who  companied  with  Him  and 
could  give  first-hand  information  about  Him.  This  great 
fact  is  obscured  by  Schmiedel,  by  suggesting  unreasonably 
late  dates  for  the  composition  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  thus 
lengthening  unwarrantably  the  interval  which  separates 
them  from  the  facts  which  they  narrate;  by  leaving  in  the 
background  the  richness  and  trustworthiness  of  the  tra- 
dition which  bridges  this  interval ;  by  treating  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  as  "flying  leaves"  of  wholly  unknown  provenience 
and  value;  and  by  dealing  with  them  as  if  they  were  a 
single  unsupported  document. 

It  must  not  be  supposed  that  Schmiedel  speaks  dog- 
matically upon  all  these  matters.  That  is  not  his  ordinary 
manner.  The  whole  drift  of  his  reasoning  is  towards  a 
late  date  for  the  Gospels;  he  seems  indeed  to  wish  to 
cluster  them  in  the  last  few  years  of  the  century.^-  But  he 
is  careful  to  guard  his  readers  against  supposing  that  it 
would  affect  his  estimate  of  the  value  of  their  contents  if 
they  should  turn  out  to  be  earlier.     He  says  :^^ 

"The  chronological  question  is   in  this  instance  a  very   sub- 
ordinate one.    Indeed,  even  if  our  Gospels  could  be  shown  to  have 

'^Otto  Schmiedel,  who  may  possibly  consider  himself  the  follower 
of  his  brother  in  this  matter,  gives  more  distinctly  the  following 
dates:  Mark,  A.D.  80;  Matthew  90,  with  reworking  up  to  120  or 
even  later;  Luke,  100. 

^^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1894. 


242  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

been  written  from  50  A.D.  onwards,  or  even  earlier,  we  should 
not  be  under  any  necessity  to  withdraw  our  conclusions  as  to 
their   contents,    we    should    on   the    contrary    only    have    to    say 
that  the  indubitable  transformation  in  the  original  tradition  had 
taken  place  much  more  rapidly  than  one  might  have  been  ready 
to   suppose.     The   credibility    of   the   Gospel   history   cannot  be 
established  by  an   earlier   dating  of  the   Gospels   themselves   in 
any   higher   degree   than   that   in   which   it   has   been   shown   to 
exist,    especially    as    we    know    that    even    in    the    life-time    of 
Jesus    miracles   of   every   sort  were   attributed  to   Him   in   the 
most  confident  manner.    But  as  the  transformation  has  departed 
so  far  from  the  genuine  tradition,  it  is  only  in  the  interest  of 
a  better  understanding  and  of  a  more  reasonable  appreciation 
of   the   process    that   one   should   claim   for   its   working   out    a 
considerable  period  of  time." 
On  the  peculiarities  of  the  reasoning  of  this  paragraph  we 
do  not  feel  called  upon  to  comment.     Each  sentence  seems 
to  neutralize  its  immediate  neighbors.     But  in  any  event 
few  will  be   found  to  agree  with   Schmiedel  that  it  will 
make  no  difference  in  our  estimate  of  the  credibility  of  the 
Gospels   whether   we   place   their   own   composition   about 
A.D.  100,  and  that  of  their  chief  sources  about  70;  or  their 
own  composition  somewhere  around  50,  and  that  of  their 
chief  sources — shall  we  say  about  40  or  35,  or  even  earlier? 
To  assert  otherwise  is  indeed  to  deny  a  fundamental  canon 
of  criticism.     For  it  is  quite  obvious  that  if  our  Gospels 
were  composed  from  50  to  70  (it  is  our  own  belief  that 
they  were  composed  in  the  sixties)  and  rest  on  sources,  to 
a  considerable  extent  recoverable  from  them,  which  come 
from  a  period  ten  or  twenty  years — or  more — earlier,  we 
possess  in  them  in  effect  contemporaneous  testimony.     And 
contemporaneous   testimony   of   such  mass   and  constancy 
cannot  be  lightly  neglected.     It  is  not  easy  to  believe  in  a 
transformation  so  great  as  that  which  is  assumed,  taking 
place  so  rapidly  as  in  this  case  it  must  have  done ;  though, 
of  course,   this  will  not  appear   formidable  to   Schmiedel 
who  allows  that  Jesus  was  looked  upon  as  a  supernatural 
person  even  in  His  lifetime,  thus  admitting  in  effect  that 
it  is  not  a  question  of  transformation  with  which  we  are 
concerned  but  a  question  of  the  credibility  of  contempora- 
neous testimony.     From  our  point  of  view,  at  any  rate. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         243 

it  is  not  a  matter  of  indifference  whether  the  Gospels  are 
dated  near  lOO  A.D.,  or  between  50  and  70,  and  we  there- 
fore think  it  worth  while  to  insist  that  there  is  really  no 
reason  for  removing  any  of  them  to  a  time  later  than  A.D. 
70,  as  even  a  Harnack  has  (somewhat  tardily)  come  to 
see.^* 

No  more  than  the  early  dates  of  the  Gospels  does  Schmie- 
del  dogmatically  deny  the  richness  of  the  tradition  that  lies 
behind  them.  He  even  elsewhere  fully  recognizes  it,  in- 
vestigating with  great  diligence  the  sources  of  the  sources 
and  intimating  the  far-reaching  consequences  which  the 
recognition  of  them  has  upon  the  literary  criticism  of  the 
Gospels. ^^  But  when  he  comes  to  consider  the  credibility 
of  the  Gospel  narratives  he  ignores  altogether  the  fulness 
and  constancy  of  this  historical  tradition  of  which  they  are 
merely  the  vehicles.  We  do  not  forget  that  this  is  in  ac- 
cord with  his  professed  procedure;  that  precisely  what  he 
proposes  to  do  is  to  turn  away  from  literary  criticism  and 
to  seek  to  reach  a  decision  upon  the  credibility  of  the 
narratives   by   a   historical   criticism   which,   wholly   inde- 

**  Cf.  W.  P.  Armstrong,  in  the  Princeton  Biblical  and  Theological 
Studies,  1912,  pp.  348-9:  "With  the  increasing  recognition  of  the  evi- 
dence for  the  early  date  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  their  sources — of 
whatever  kind  and  constitution — being  still  earlier — carry  back  the 
w^itness  of  the  documents  to  the  time  of  the  eye-witnesses.  And 
among  these  there  was  no  difference  of  opinion  concerning  the  factual 
basis  which  underlies  the  tradition  recorded  by  the  Gospels  in  concrete 
and  varying  forms.  To  admit  with  Harnack  that  the  Gospel  of  Luke 
was  written  before  70  A.D.,  and  early  in  the  sixties  (Netie  Unter- 
suchungen  sur  Apostelgeschichte,  pp.  81  ff),  is  to  accept  a  fact  which 
has  an  obvious  bearing  on  the  origin  of  the  sources  of  the  Synoptic 
Gospels, — a  fact  which  makes  it  difficult,  as  Harnack  himself  fore- 
saw {Die  Apostelgeschichte,  p.  221.  n.  2),  to  regard  as  legendary 
their  account  of  supernatural  events.  For  if  the  Gospels  embody  the 
view  of  Jesus  which  was  current  in  the  primitive  community  about 
60  A.D.,— as  Heitmiiller  admits— or  earlier— as  Harnack's  dating 
of  Luke  requires — the  rejection  of  their  witness  cannot  be  based 
upon  their  differences  or  upon  purely  historical  considerations.  Re- 
course must  be  had  to  a  principle  springing  ultimately  out  of  philo- 
sophical conceptions  by  which  their  unanimous  witness  to  essential 
features  in  their  portraiture  of  Jesus  may  be  set  aside."  Cf.  also  the 
accompanying  note    180. 

"^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1862  ff  §§  128-129. 


244  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

pendently  of  literary  criticism,  works  directly  upon  the 
transmitted  material  itself  without  consideration  of  the 
modes  or  channels  of  its  transmission.  But  precisely  what 
we  are  complaining  of  is  the  impropriety  of  this  method. 
It  is  in  essence  an  attempt  to  ignore  a  fundamental  fact, 
the  fact,  that  is,  that  the  Synoptic  Gospels  do  not  stand 
off  in  isolation,  and  cannot  be  dealt  with  as  if  they  were, — 
or  even  as  if  they  were  only  possibly — a  body  of  inven- 
tions; but  are  known  to  rest  on  a  background  of  copious, 
consentient  and  contemporary  historical  tradition.  To  lose 
sight  of  this  fact  is  to  lose  sight  of  the  primary  fact  in 
the  case,  and  to  do  violence  to  the  fundamental  law  of 
evidence  which  demands  that  well-attested  facts  shall  not 
be  treated  as  unattested  facts.  What  Schmiedel  asks  of 
us  is  to  begin  our  investigation  into  the  credibility  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  by  abstracting  our  attention  from  the 
primary  evidence  of  their  credibility,  viz.,  that  they  are  but 
vehicles  of  a  copious  and  unbroken  historical  tradition 
which  is  contemporaneous  with  the  facts  which  it  trans- 
mits. Having  failed  to  shake  this  testimony  by  literary 
criticism  he  proposes — not  to  allow  it  its  due  weight  but — 
to  neglect  it  and  direct  his  assault  upon  the  credibility  of 
the  Gospel-narratives  to  another  point ! 

It  is  part  of  this  studied  disregard  of  the  real  conditions 
of  the  case,  that  Schmiedel  treats  the  Synoptic  Gospels  as 
documents  of  entirely  unknown  provenience  and  value.  Here 
indeed  he  becomes  even  dogmatic.  He  is  quite  sure  that 
the  Third  Gospel,  for  example,  is  not  the  production  of 
Paul's  companion,  Luke,  although  he  is  equally  sure  that 
this  Gospel  and  the  Book  of  Acts  are  from  the  same  pen  f^ 
he  will  not  concede  to  Luke  even  the  "we"-sections  of  Acts, 
which  he  considers  to  come  from  a  different  hand  from  the 
rest  of  the  book.  We  take  it  however,  that, — as  even  a 
Harnack  again  has  come  to  perceive^'^ — a  sober  criticism 

••  Ibid.,  col.  1893. 

"  See  especially  nos.  i.  iii.  and  iv.  of  Harnack's  New  Testament 
Studies  (Crown  Theological  Library,  xx.,  xxvii.,  xxxiii.)  :  Luke  the 
Physician,  1907;  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  igog;  The  Date  of  the 
Acts  and  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  1911. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         245 

must  allow  that  Acts  is  all  of  a  piece — "we"-passages  and 
all — and  Acts  and  the  Third  Gospel  are  from  the  same 
hand,  and  this  hand  is  that  to  which  a  constant  historical 
tradition  has  from  the  earliest  times  ascribed  both  books, — 
that  of  Luke.  This  being  so,  the  Gospel  of  Luke  is  en- 
titled to  the  credit  which  belongs  to  a  book  by  a  known 
author,  of  known  opportunities  to  inform  himself  of  the 
subject-matter  of  which  he  treats,  and  of  known  will  and 
capacity  to  treat  that  subject-matter  worthily.  Luke  is 
known  to  have  been  an  educated  physician,  who  as  a  com- 
panion of  Paul's  was  exceptionally  favorably  situated  for 
learning  the  facts  concerning  Jesus.  Whatever  Paul  knew, 
he  knew.  Whatever  was  known  by  other  companions  of 
Paul's  into  contact  with  whom  he  came,  some  of  whom 
(as  for  example  John  Mark)  had  come  out  of  the  circle 
of  Jesus'  immediate  disciples,  he  knew.  He  even  visited 
Jerusalem  in  company  with  Paul;  and  resided  with  him 
for  two  years  at  Caesarea  in  touch  with  primitive  dis- 
ciples. What  such  a  writer  has  given  us  concerning  Jesus, 
set  down  in  such  an  obviously  painstaking  narrative, — es- 
pecially when  it  proves  to  be  wholly  at  one  with  what  is 
given  us  by  Paul,  as  well  as  by  his  fellow  evangelists  in 
equally  painstaking  narratives,  and  indeed  with  the  whole 
previous  tradition  so  far  as  that  tradition  can  be  pene- 
trated,— cannot  be  treated  simply  as  floating  reports.®^ 

°^It  may  conduce  to  a  better  understanding  of  the  trustworthiness  of 
Luke  as  a  biographer  if  we  will  look  at  it  in  the  light  of  an  analogous 
case.  Why  is  not  Luke's  relation  to  the  subjects  he  deals  with  in 
his  Gospel  much  the  same  as  that  of,  say,  Mr.  Clement  R.  Shorter 
to  the  Brontes?  Mr.  Shorter  did  not  know  the  Brontes.  But  he 
has  diligently  sought  out  the  facts  from  those  who  knew  them,  and 
from  those  who  have  described  them  at  first  hand.  His  title  page 
very  fairly  parallels  Luke's  prologue :  "The  Brontes :  Life  and 
Letters.  Being  an  attempt  to  present  a  full  and  final  record  of  the 
lives  of  the  three  sisters,  Charlotte,  Emily  and  Anne  Bronte,  from  the 
Biographies  of  Mrs.  Gaskell  and  others,  and  from  numerous  hitherto 
unpublished  Manuscripts  and  Letters."  That  is  not  far  from  the  way 
Luke  might  have  phrased  his  title  page:  "Jesus  Christ:  Life  and 
Teachings.  Being  an  attempt  to  present  a  trustworthy  record  of  His 
life  from  the  biographies  which  have  been  published  of  Him,  and 
from  hitherto  unpublished  recollections  communicated  by  those  who 


246  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

With  elements  of  the  actual  state  of  the  case  like  these 
clearly  in  mind,  we  shall  know  what  estimate  to  place  on 
the  extremely  sceptical  attitude  which  Schmiedel  takes  up 
with  reference  to  the  Synoptic  narratives.  He  does  not 
approach  them  with  the  deference  due  to  an  exceptionally 
well-attested  historical  tradition,  but  with  an  already  active 
assumption  of  their  untrustworthiness,  in  the  portrait  of 
Jesus  which  they  transmit.  Of  this  assumption  no  justifica- 
tion is  possible  and  none  is  attempted.  We  cannot  rank 
as  such  the  pages  in  which  there  are  accumulated  elements 
in  the  Synoptic  narratives  "which  for  any  reason  arising 
either  from  the  substance  or  from  considerations  of  liter- 
ary criticism"  seem  to  Schmiedel  "doubtful  or  wrong  ;"^^ 
and  which  he  closes  with  the  words :  "The  foregoing  sec- 
tions may  have  sometimes  seemed  to  raise  a  doubt  whether 
any  credible  elements  were  to  be  found  in  the  Gospels  at 
^]j  "100     gy|.   these   sections   register  the   effects   not   the 


knew  Him."  Of  course,  this  is  second-hand  biography;  Luke,  like 
Mr.  Shorter,  belongs  to  the  second  generation.  But,  like  Mr.  Shorter, 
he  enjoyed  exceptional  opportunities  to  learn  the  truth,  and 
exhibits  exceptional  zeal  in  ascertaining  and  recording  the  truth 
of  the  matters  with  which  he  deals.  In  the  circumstances  in  which 
he  wrote  the  trustworthiness  of  his  communications,  and  particularly 
of  the  general  portraiture  he  gives  of  Jesus,  is  not  lessened, — it  is 
perhaps  even  enhanced — by  his  secondariness.  Mrs.  Gaskell's  Life  of 
Charlotte  Bronte  cannot  be  superseded ;  but  Mr.  Shorter's  account  is 
not  inferior  in  trustworthiness  to  it.  The  sources  from  which  Luke 
drew  are,  of  course,  more  original  than  his  own  narrative;  but  his 
narrative  resting  on  these  written  sources,  supplemented  by  his  own  in- 
quiries, does  not  yield  in  trustworthiness  to  them.  It  is,  in  fact,  just 
these  sources  themselves,  tested  and  supplemented  by  competent  in- 
quiry in  original  quarters,  and  these  sources  do  not  lose  but  increase 
in  value  by  being  incorporated  in  such  a  work  as  Luke's.  By  all 
means  let  us  go  back  to  the  Narrative-Source,  and  to  the  Discourse- 
Source,  and  to  any  other  sources  we  can  identify,  so  far  as  we 
can  isolate  them;  but  let  us  not  fancy  that  out  of  Luke  they  are  more 
trustworthy  than  they  are  in  Luke,  or  that  the  cement  in  which  Luke 
imbeds  them  is  less  trustworthy  than  they  are — this  cement  itself  is 
from  original  sources.  It  is  not  merely  what  Mr.  Shorter  repeats 
from  Mrs.  Gaskell  or  other  formal  biographies  which  is  worthy  of 
credit  in  his  book. 

^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1873-1881 ;  §§  132-138. 

^"Ibid..  col.  1882. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  247 

cause  of  the  scepticism  with  which  Schmiedel  approaches 
the  Synoptic  narratives  and  form  a  body  of  what  is  little 
better  than  special  pleading.  Nowhere  are  the  Synoptic 
narratives  given  the  benefit  of  the  presumption  which  lies  in 
their  favor;  that  is  to  say,  nowhere  is  any  consideration 
shown  to  the  weight  of  the  historical  tradition  of  which  they 
are  but  the  vehicles,  and  which  confessedly  stretches  back  to 
the  very  beginning  of  the  Christian  movement.  The  one 
aim  of  all  his  criticism  is  to  set  aside  this  tradition;  the 
principle  he  invokes  is  that  of  contradiction;  and  the  effect 
of  his  criticism  is  to  substitute  for  the  portrait  of  Jesus 
handed  down  by  the  entire  tradition  a  new  portrait  related 
to  it  as  its  precise  opposite. ^"^ 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  in  this  extreme  scepticism  as 
over  against  the  whole  historic  tradition  Schmiedel  re- 
ceives no  encouragement  whatever  from  the  general  prac- 
tice of  historians.  We  have  only  to  glance  over  even  the 
brief  extracts  we  have  cited^°^  from  the  methodologists  to 
perceive  in  how  different  a  spirit  historians  are  accustomed 
to  approach  their  task.  The  attitude  they  commend  to  us 
is  one  of  general  deference  to  positive  testimony;  and  if 
they  point  out  conditions  which  in  particular  instances  may 
rightly  modify  this  deference  or  even  neutralize  it,  and 
indicate  methods  of  procedure  by  which,  when  suspicion 
is  justified,  the  more  trustworthy  elements  of  a  tradition 
may  be  sifted  out,  they  never  suggest  an  attitude  of 
general  scepticism  as  over  against  positive  testimony;  they 
even  expressly  deny  the  propriety  of  altogether  rejecting 
positive  testimony  on  merely  internal  grounds.  The  whole 
tendency  of  the  recommendations  of  the  methodologists  is 
towards  respect  to  positive  testimony,  and  they  test  it  with 
a  view  rather  to  discovering  what  we  can  most  completely 
trust   than   with   a   view   to   disregarding   it   in   principle. 

'"Johannes  Weiss,  Jesus  von  Nazareth,  etc.,  1910,  pp.  84-85  has  some 
wise  words  on  "the  really  morbid  scepticism"  which  is  too  often  per- 
mitted by  modern  critics  (his  example  is  Wrede)  to  intrude  between 
the  source  and  the  reader. 

'"^  See  above  pp.  234-6. 


248  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

Schmiedel,  on  the  contrary,  begins  with  the  rejection  of  the 
tradition  in  principle  although  it  is  exceptionally  copiously 
and  harmoniously  attested;  and  sets  himself  to  seek  in  it 
not  the  most  trustworthy  elements  in  a  generally  trust- 
worthy tradition,  on  the  basis  of  which  the  whole  positive 
testimony  may  be  given  its  rightful  coloring  and  validity; 
but  encysted  elements  of  an  underlying  truth  in  contradic- 
tion to  the  whole  testimony,  on  the  basis  of  which  he  can 
reverse  the  tradition  and  recover  the  lost  truth  submerged 
by  it.  For  a  procedure  of  this  sort,  applied  to  a  historical 
tradition  such  as  that  embodied  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels, 
supported  as  that  tradition  is  by  a  wealth  of  extraneous 
testimony  such  for  example  as  that  of  Paul,  and 
traceable  as  it  is  back  to  contemporary  sources,  it  is  safe 
to  say  no  support  can  be  found  in  the  recognized  practice  of 
secular  historians.  It  is  in  fact  not  a  historical  procedure 
which  is  proposed  at  all ;  it  is  pure  anti-historism — a  bold  at- 
tempt to  pour  history  into  the  mould  of  an  a  priori  construc- 
tion. Against  such  a  procedure  the  methodologists  protest 
with  all  their  strength.  No  one  has  less  their  respect  than 
the  critic  who — as  Bouche-Leclercq  expresses  it — "after 
having  discredited  all  his  witnesses,  claims  to  put  himself  in 
their  place,  and  sees  with  their  eyes  something  quite  different 
from  what  they  saw."^''^  "The  one  thing  which  is  illegiti- 
mate for  criticism,"  remarks  H.  B.  George,^"*  "is  to  assume 
that  it  can  divine  the  truth  underlying  the  existing  nar- 
rative, which  it  declares  to  be  more  or  less  fabulous."^"^ 

Certainly  it  will  be  admitted  that  if  a  historical  tradition 
like  that  transmitted  to  us  in  the  narratives  of  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  is  to  be  reversed  on  the  faith  of  fragments  of  a 

"'  Quoted  by  Seignobos,  in  Langlois  and  Seignobos,  Introduction  to 
the  Study  of  History,  1898,  p.  156,  note  2. 

^"^ Historical  Evidence,  1909,  p.  69.  He  adds:  "It  can  put  forward 
conjectures  and  they  may  seem  probable;  but  nothing  can  transform 
them  into  ascertained  facts." 

^'"'F.  J.  A.  Hort  long  ago  warned  us  that  "criticism  is  not  dangerous 
except  when  as  in  so  much  Christian  criticism,  it  is  merely  the  tool 
for  reaching  a  result  not  itself  believed  in  on  that  ground,  but  on  the 
ground  of  speculative  postulates"  {Hulsean  Lectures,  p.  177). 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  249 

rival  tradition  which,  if  not  older  (for  there  can  scarcely 
be  a  tradition  older  than  that  which  confessedly  was  shared 
by  the  immediate  disciples  of  Jesus)  is  yet  truer,  imbedded 
in  it  like  flies  in  amber,  then  these  fragments  of  the  truer 
tradition  must  authenticate  themselves  with  absolute  cer- 
tainty as  quite  irreconcilable  with  the  tradition  which  is 
to  be  replaced  by  them.  Schmiedel,  in  point  of  fact,  does 
not  fail  to  claim  this  absolute  contrariety  with  the  tradition 
in  which  they  are  imbedded  for  his  "pillar-passages."  It 
is  because  he  finds  imbedded  in  the  Synoptic  narrative  oc- 
casional statements  which  run  absolutely  counter  to  it  in 
its  fundamental  tendency,  and  therefore  cannot  owe  their 
origin  to  the  invention  of  those  to  whom  this  narrative  (im- 
mediately or  ultimately)  is  due,  that  he  feels  able  to  point 
to  them  as  fragments  of  an  underlying  truer  tradition 
which  would  have  perished  save  for  the  vitality  of  these 
fragments.  They  were  too  firmly  established  in  the  minds 
of  the  followers  of  Jesus  to  be  passed  by;  and  have  there- 
fore been  taken  up  into  the  growing  legend  to  preserve  the 
memory  of  the  real  Jesus,  which  it  was  obliterating.  When 
we  come  to  scrutinize  these  relics  of  truer  recollection, 
however,  we  are  surprised  to  note  how  little  they  are  able 
to  bear  the  burden  of  the  argument  which  is  erected  upon 
them.  Schmiedel  selects  nine  of  them  for  special  remark. 
He  intimates  that  these  are  by  no  means  all  that  might  be 
gathered  out  of  the  fabric  of  the  narrative.  ^*^^  But  it  lies 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  that  they  are  fairly  representative 
of  the  whole  body ;  and  indeed  that  they  present  the  clearest 
and  most  convincing  instances  of  the  phenomenon  adverted 
to.  Schmiedel  himself  divides  them  into  two  categories. 
Five  of  them,  he  tells  us,  "throw  light  on  Jesus'  figure  as 
a  whole;"  the  other  four  "have  a  special  bearing  on  His 
character  as  a  worker  of  wonders. "^''^  To  speak  more 
plainly  the  five  former  of  them  are  supposed  to  stand  in 
irreconcilable  contradiction  with  the  deification  of  Jesus 
which  had  grown  up  in  the  Christian  community ;  the  latter 

"'  See  e.g.,  Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  xiii. 
""Die  Person  Jesu,  etc.,  p.  7.  E.  T.  p.  18. 


250  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

four  are  supposed  to  stand  in  equally  irreconcilable  con- 
tradiction with  the  ascription  of  miracles  in  the  strict 
sense  to  Jesus,  which  had  also  become  the  custom  of  the 
Christian  community.  On  the  basis  of  the  former  five 
Schmiedel  thinks  that  we  are  entitled  to  assert  that  Jesus 
was  originally  fully  understood  by  His  followers  to  be 
merely  a  human  being;  on  the  basis  of  the  latter  four  that 
He  was  equally  fully  understood  by  His  followers  originally 
to  be  a  wholly  non-miraculous  man.  The  two  classes  of 
statements  together  make  it  clear  that  Jesus  was  not  at 
first  the  object  of  worship  by  His  followers:  they  are 
"not  consistent  with  the  worship  in  which  Jesus  came  to  be 
held ;"  "they  are  appropriate  only  to  a  man,  and  could  never 
by  any  possibility  have  been  written  had  the  author  been 
thinking  of  a  demi-god."^^^ 

Now,  the  singular  thing  is,  that  some  of  the  "pillar- 
passages,"  at  least,  even  with  the  meaning  which  Schmiedel 
puts  upon  them,  do  not  obviously  have  the  directly  con- 
tradictory bearing  upon  the  attribution  of  deity  or  of  the 
possession  of  supernatural  powers  to  Jesus,  which  is  as- 
cribed to  them,  and  which  is  required  of  them  if  they  are 
to  serve  the  function  put  upon  them.  It  is  not  immediately 
apparent,  for  example,  that  the  statement  in  Mk.  iii.  21  to 
the  effect  "that  His  relations  held  Him  to  be  beside  Him- 
gg]:f"io9  contradicts  the  attribution  of  deity  to  Jesus.  Why 
must  a  divine  Jesus  be  supposed  to  have  been  fully  un- 
derstood "in  the  days  of  His  flesh,"  even  by  those  nearest 
to  Him?  Or,  for  the  matter  of  that,  why  should  not  wor- 
shipers of  Jesus  even  invent  such  a  statement?  "As  if," 
exclaims  Friedrich  Steudel,^^^  with  considerable  force,  "a 
poet  would  depreciate  his  hero,  by  representing  him  as  one 
who  was  misunderstood  in  his  closest  surroundings !"  As 
if,  in  a  word,  the  tendency  of  such  an  incident  as  is  here 
recorded  might  not  easily  be, — on  the  supposition  that  it  is 
part  and  parcel  of  a  mythical  account  of  a  divine  being  for 

"'  Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  xvii. 

^""Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1881 ;  cf.  Das  vierte  Evangelium,  p.  18. 

"» P.  89. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES  25I 

a  time  on  earth — precisely  to  show  His  greatness  by  rep- 
resenting that  not  only  did  His  enemies  accuse  Him  of 
working  wonders  by  the  power  of  the  Evil  One,  but  His 
very  friends  thought  Him  mad.  And  certainly  Schmiedel 
himself  must  have  felt  some  difficulty  in  including  among 
his  "pillar-passages"  Mk.  xiii.  32  {cf  Mt.  xxiv.  36),^^^ 
in  which,  if  Jesus  is  made  to  confess  that  there  was  at  least 
one  thing  He  did  not  know,  He  is  at  the  same  time  made  to, 
range  Himself  in  dignity  of  being  above  the  angels — and 
on  the  side  of  God  in  contrast  with  even  the  highest  of 
creatures.  Upon  others  of  the  "pillar-passages"  a  most  un- 
natural meaning  has  to  be  imposed  before  they  can  be 
thought  of  in  that  connection.  For  example,  in  the  nar- 
rative connected  with  Jesus'  warning  of  His  disciples  to 
beware  of  "the  leaven  of  the  Pharisees  and  of  Herod"  (Mk. 
viii.  15,  cf.  Mt.  xvi.  6),  it  is  only  by  the  most  sinuous  ex- 
egesis that  we  arrive  at  the  conclusion  that  the  miracles 
of  the  feeding  of  the  five  thousand  and  the  four  thousand 
(both  of  which  are  narrated  both  by  Matthew  and  by  Mark) 
are  only  "transformed  parables" — though  even  if  they  were, 
that  fact  would  scarcely  prove  that  Jesus  never  wrought  mir- 
acles. So,  it  is  not  a  natural  interpretation  which  reduces 
Jesus'  enumeration  of  His  miraculous  works  in  reply  to 
the  inquiry  of  John  the  Baptist's  message  (Mt.  xi.  5,  Lk. 
V.  22),  to  a  series  of  figurative  statements  which  mean  only 
that  He  was  exercising  notable  spiritual  power  among  the 
people — though  again,  even  were  that  the  true  interpreta- 
tion, it  would  scarcely  prove  that  Jesus  wrought  no  mir- 
acles. At  the  most,  it  would  suggest  that  He  laid  greater 
stress  on  His  spiritual  than  on  His  physical  miracles;  and 
surely  that  is  obvious  enough  in  any  case.  It  is  unreason- 
able, further,  to  insist  on  an  interpretation  of  Jesus'  refusal 
to  give  a  "sign"  (Mk.  viii.  12,  cf.  Mt.  xv.  4,  and  further  Mt. 
xii.  39,  Lk.  xi.  29)  which  makes  it  a  categorical  declaration 
on  Jesus'  part  that  He  would  work  in  no  circumstances 
any  sort  of  miracle,  and  therefore  a  confession  by  Him 


See  Das  vierte  Evangelium,  p.  22. 


352  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

that  He  could  work  no  miracle.  The  context  suggests  a 
very  different  interpretation,  and  Schmiedel  himself  is  free 
elsewhere  to  point  out  a  distinction  between  miracles  as  such 
and  miracles  as  "signs. "^^^  Similarly,  it  is  an  unreasonable 
interpretation  of  Jesus'  inability  to  work  miracles  at  Nazar- 
eth (Mk.  vi.  5:  "He  could  not")  to  make  it  teach 
that  it  was  never  He  that  worked  miracles,  but  the  people 
themselves  by  the  ardor  of  their  faith;  and  to  infer  from 
this  that  the  real  Jesus  wrought  no  other  wonders  than 
"faith  cures. "^^^  The  narrative  itself  includes  in  the 
broader  category  of  "mighty  works",  as  of  like  supernatural 
character  with  them,  these  "faith  cures"  (if  we  insist  on 
describing  them  by  this  name)  which  He  worked  also  at 
Nazareth ;  attributes  these  "mighty  works"  to  Him  as  ordi- 
nary acts  ;^^^  and  leaves  no  other  interpretation  possible  than 
that  His  "inability"  to  work  these  mighty  works  at  Nazar- 
eth was  a  moral  and  not  a  natural  "inability";  it  was  un- 
suitable for  Him  to  do  so.^^^  Even  were  it  otherwise  it  still 
would  not  be  clear  why  a  limitation  upon  Jesus'  power  to 
work  miracles  imposed  by  unbelief  should  argue  a  general 
inability  in  Him  to  work  miracles.  Precisely  what  Jesus 
meant  to  imply  when  He  declared  that  speaking  against  His 
person  might  be  forgiven,  while  blasphemy  against  the  Holy 


"^  Ibid.,  pp.  15  ff. 

^^Encyclopaedia  Bihlica,  §§  141,  I44;  e.g.  col.  1885:  "It  is  quite 
permissible  for  us  to  regard  as  historical  only  those  of  the  class 
which  even  at  the  present  day  physicians  are  able  to  effect  by  psychical 
methods"  .  .  .  ;  Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  17.  The  same  con- 
clusion is  reached  on  the  same  grounds  by  W.  Heitmiiller,  Schiele 
and  Zscharnack's  Die  Religion,  etc.,  III.  1912,  p.  372. 

*^*  Mk.  vi.  2,  5  :  "Whence  hath  this  man  these  things — and  what  mean 
such  mighty  works  wrought  by  His  hands?"  "And  He  could  there  do 
no  mighty  work  save  that  He  laid  His  hands  upon  a  few  sick  folk, 
and  healed  them." 

""  Cf.  H.  R.  Mackintosh,  The  Doctrine  of  the  Person  of  Jesus  Christ, 
1912,  p.  14 :  "The  verdict  passed  on  Nazareth  to  the  effect  that,  owing 
to  the  unbelief  He  encountered  there,  Jesus  could  work  no  miracle 
(Mk.  vi.  5),  has  often  been  misconstrued.  The  meaning  is  not  that 
the  people's  mistrust  deprived  Him  of  Messianic  power;  it  is  rather 
that  the  ethical  conditions  of  reception  being  absent,  a  moral  impossi- 
bility existed  that  He  should  put  His  power  in  active  operation." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S      PILLAR-PASSAGES"         253 

Spirit  would  not  be  forgiven  (Mt.  xii.  31)  may  be  an  open 
question.^^^  But  it  is  not  obvious  that  He  must  have  meant 
that  His  person  was  inferior  in  dignity  to  that  of  the  Holy 
Spirit,  as  Schmiedel  assumes  ;^^^  and  if  He  did,  it  is  not 
obvious  that  this  implies  a  self-confession  of  His  mere  hu- 
manity. It  may  be  plausible  to  argue  that  He  refuses  the 
address  "Good  Master"  (Mk.  x.  17)  and  in  doing  so  spoke 
out  of  a  human  consciousness ;  but  this  interpretation  of  the 
passage  is  by  no  means  to  be  accepted  as  certain,  or  even 
probable, — or,  we  might  justly  add,  even  possible.^^^  The  cry 
of  dereliction  on  the  cross  (Mt.  xv.  34)  certainly  seems  the 
expression  of  a  human  consciousness,  though  why  of  a 
merely  human  consciousness  does  not  appear.^^^  If  then 
recognition  of  Jesus  as  human  is  equivalent  to  denying 
Him  to  be  divine,  there  is  a  single  passage  among  Schmie- 
del's  nine  which  clearly  contradicts  the  ascription  of  deity 
to  Jesus:  and  others  of  them  may,  no  doubt,  be  put  for- 
ward with  more  or  less  plausibility  in  the  same  interest,  if 
we  are  set  upon  making  out  an  argument  vi  et  armis.  But 
to  advance  these  passages  as  definitely  inconsistent  with  the 
attribution  of  deity  or  miracles  to  Jesus,  so  inconsistent  that 
they  must  be  recognized  as  remnants  of  a  truer  tradition  of 
a  merely  human,  non-miraculous  Jesus,  and  able  to  bear  the 
weight  of  a  structure  which  must  supersede  the  portrait  of 

"•W.  Liitgert,  Die  Liebe  im  N.  T.,  1905,  p.  99,  wishes  to  explain  the 
passage  from  the  general  principle  that  Jesus'  anger  burns  against 
offenses  against  God,  never  against  offenses  against  Himself:  "The 
same  simple  rule  lies  at  the  bottom  of  the  declaration  about  the 
blasphemy  of  the  Spirit.  What  is  spoken  against  the  Son  of  Man, 
that  is,  against  Him  personally,  Jesus  pardons;  what  on  the  other 
hand  is  spoken  against  the  Spirit,  that  is,  against  God,— that  is  un- 
pardonable." 

"'  Das  vierte  Evangeliuni,  p.  33.  Cf.  the  good  reply  of  Karl  Thieme, 
Die  christliche  Demut,  I.  1906,  p.  139,  who  says  that  the  clause  "and 
whosoever  shall  say  a  word  against  the  Son  of  Man,  it  shall  be  for- 
given him"  here  has  the  same  effect  as  the  clause  "nor  yet  the  Son"  in 
xxiv.  26,  and  is  "less  an  offensive  minification  than  a  great  glorification 
of  Jesus." 

^  Cf.  what  Karl  Thieme  has  to  say,  as  cited,  pp.  106  ff. 

"*  Schmiedel  himself  will  not  admit  that  it  was  a  cry  of  despair 
(Jesus  in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  50). 


254  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

the  divine,  miraculous  Jesus  drawn  in  the  Synoptic  tra- 
dition, and  in  all  other  extant  tradition,  can  strike  us  as 
nothing  but  a  counsel  of  despair. 

A  further  consideration,  which  has  already  been  hinted 
at  in  passing,  requires  emphasizing  at  this  point.  W.  B. 
Smith  has  urged  with  some  persistency  that  if  these  "pillar- 
passages"  are  really  inconsistent  with  the  Synoptic  tradi- 
tion, the  writers  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are  strangely  un- 
aware of  it.  That  the  Synoptic  Gospels  record  these  state- 
ments must,  he  thinks,  at  least  be  recognized  as  evidence 
that  their  asserted  inconsistency  with  the  fundamental  ten- 
dency of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  is  imaginary.  And  then 
Smith  adds  with  force  i'^^^ 

"They  may  seem  to  m^  what  they  will;   in  the  view  of  the 
authors  of  the  Gospels,  who  were  worshippers  of  Jesus,  they 
certainly  were  not  incompatible  with  that  worship.    The  ground 
of  this   contention   is   obvious.     Had   these   passages   been   felt 
as  irreconcilable  with  worship  of  Jesus,  with  the  cult  of  Jesus 
as  a  God,  they  would  have  been  altered,  and  their  disharmony 
corrected." 
It  is  easy,  no  doubt  to  rejoin  that  it  is  by  no  means  in- 
conceivable or  even  unexampled  that  inconsistent  elements 
of  fact  should  be  preserved  in  a  growing  legend;  this  is, 
as    Bernheim    expresses    it,^^^    the    homage   which   legend 
pays  to  truth,  and  it  may  easily  occur  without  consciousness, 
or  at  least  clear  consciousness,  of  it  on  the  part  of  the 
writer.  As  to  the  harmonizing-  of  these  statements  with  the 
legend,  why,  is  it  not  part  of  Schmiedel's  contention  that  this 
is  precisely  what  was  done,  and  that  we  can  trace  the  pro- 
cess in  the  Synoptic  record  itself?^--    This  rejoinder  scarce- 


''^  Ecce  Dens,  etc.,  p.  179.  Cf.  the  summary  on  p.  181:  "I  permit 
myself  to  repeat :  The  mere  fact  that  a  declaration  or  an  act  is  as- 
cribed to  Jesus  by  the  author  of  a  Gospel  is  a  positive  proof  that  it 
did  not  stand  in  conscious  contradiction  to  the  conception  of  Jesus 
held  by  that  author;  and  it  is  moreover  not  probable  that  an  uncon- 
scious contradiction  is  present,  for  these  Gospels  are  very  unusually 
well  thought-out  works". 

^Lehrbuch  der  historischen  Methode,  p.  523   (see  above  pp.  234-5). 

^  Preface  to  Neumann,  p.  xi. :  "I,  of  set  purpose,  selected  only 
those  passages  in  which  it  is  possible  to  show  from  the  text  of  the 
Gospels   themselves   that   they   are   incompatible   with    the   worship    in 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         255 

ly,  however,  meets  the  objection.  The  Synoptic  Gospels 
are  not  simply  sections  of  a  growing  legend,  gradually 
working  its  way  to  the  consistent  presentation  of  a  ger- 
minal conception.  They  are,  each  of  them,  the  careful 
composition  of  a  thoughtful,  alert  writer  alive  to  his  pur- 
poses to  his  finger-tips.  And  the  method  by  which  the 
supposed  progressive  harmonization  of  the  incongruous 
elements  of  truth  with  the  demands  of  the  legend  is  de- 
tected, is  one  of  extreme  untrustworthiness,  in  the  con- 
clusions of  which,  to  speak  frankly,  no  dependence  what- 
ever can  be  placed.  The  general  canon  which  governs  it 
is  justly  challenged  as  without  foundation  in  fact;^^^  and 
the  processes  by  which  under  this  general  canon  findings  are 
reached  in  individual  cases  are  fatally  mechanical  and  con- 
fessedly capable  of  making  out  an  equally  plausible  case 
for  any  finding  desired. ^^*  After  all  said,  we  must  revert 
to  the  fundamental  canon  of  all  criticism  of  this  order, 
emphasized  as  such  by  all  the  Methodologists.^-^  We  must 
not  impute  ourselves  to  the  writers  we  are  criticising,  but 


which  Jesus  came  to  be  held.  Thus,  they  are  all  of  them  found  only 
in  one  Gospel,  or  at  most  in  two;  the  second  and  third,  or  the  third, 
either  omits  the  passage  in  question,  although  by  universal  consent, 
the  author  who  omits  must  have  known  at  least  one  of  the  Gospels  in 
which  it  occurs,  or  the  source  from  which  it  was  drawn ;  or,  al- 
ternatively, he  turns  it  round,  often  with  great  ingenuity  and  boldness, 
in  such  a  manner  that  it  loses  the  element  which  makes  it  open  to 
exception  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  worshipper  of  Jesus."  Cf.  Jesus 
in  Modern  Criticism,  p.  16;  Das  vierte  Evangelium,  p.  17;  Encyclo- 
paedia Biblica,  col.   1872. 

"^Thus,  for  example,  Franz  Dibelius,  Das  Abendmahl,  1911,  re- 
marks that  the  canon  of  literary  criticism,  which  is  uniformly  fol- 
lowed, runs:  "Where  there  are  differing  accounts,  that  one  deserves 
the  most  credit  which  is  the  simplest,  that  is,  commonly,  which  is  the 
briefest;  where  important  elements  of  the  one  are  lacking  in  another, 
they  are  later,  interpolated  additions"  (p.  2)  ;  and  then  he  criticises 
its  validity  sharply  (p.  7). 

"^^  Schmiedel  himself  remarks  {Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1846)  that 
"every  assertion,  no  matter  how  evident,  as  to  the  priority  of  one 
evangelist  and  the  posteriority  of  another  in  any  given  passage,  will 
be  found  to  have  been  turned  the  other  way  round  by  quite  a  number 
of  scholars  of  repute. 

"'C/.  Bernheim  above,  p.  235;   Seignobos,  above,  pp.  235-6. 


256  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

must  judge  of  alleged  contradictions  occurring  in  their 
narratives  not  from  our  own  point  of  view  but  from  theirs. 
We  cannot  avoid  raising  the  question,  therefore,  whether 
the  statements  declared  in  Schmiedel's  ''pillar-passages" 
to  be  inconsistent  with  the  historical  tradition  embodied  in 
the  Synoptic  narratives  merely  seem  to  us  incompatible 
with  the  fundamental  tendency  of  that  tradition,  or  are 
such  as  must  have  been  felt  by  the  authors  of  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  themselves  to  be  contradictory  to  their  fundamental 
conception  of  Jesus.  In  the  former  case  we  may  perhaps 
be  in  a  position  to  pronounce  the  legend  of  Jesus,  as  pre- 
sented in  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  not  quite  self-consistent; 
that  is  our  own  affair  and  concerns  only  our  personal  at- 
titude towards  the  figure  of  Jesus.  It  is  only  in  the  latter 
case  that  we  should  be  in  a  position  to  point  to  such  pas- 
sages as  evidence  of  the  existence  of  a  better  tradition  un- 
derlying the  Synoptic  tradition  on  the  basis  of  which  the 
latter  should  be  corrected.  When  this  only  relevant  ques- 
tion is  fairly  faced  it  is  by  no  means  impertinent  to  point 
out  that  if  the  statements  of  the  "pillar-passages"  are  really 
inconsistent  with  the  historical  tradition  embodied  in  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  it  is  strange  that  these  Gospels  are  so 
completely  unconscious  of  it. 

In  point  of  fact  the  argument  based  on  the  "pillar- 
passages"  has  been  pushed  through  with  very  little  con- 
sideration for  the  point  of  view  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  or 
of  the  historical  tradition  they  represent.  It  has  been  made 
to  run  much  as  follows.  The  Synoptic  Gospels  represent 
a  tradition  in  which  worship  of  Jesus  is  the  dominating 
feature :  they  make  it  their  business  to  present  before  ador- 
ing eyes  the  figure  of  a  divine,  miraculous  Jesus :  but  we 
find  embedded  in  their  narrative  statements  which  present 
to  us  the  figure  of  a  human  Jesus,  a  Jesus  with  the  limita- 
tions that  belong  to  a  man :  these  statements  must  be  as 
yet  unassimilated  fragments  of  a  truer  tradition :  other- 
wise their  presence  in  this  tradition  of  a  divine  Jesus  would 
be  unaccountable :  we  must,  therefore,  base  our  conception 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL  S  "PILLAR-PASSAGEs"         257 

of  the  real  Jesus  on  these  unassimilated  fragments,  and  re- 
ject all  in  the  tradition  embodied  in  these  Gospels  which  is 
inconsistent  with  them.  The  underlying  assumption  is  that 
Jesus  must  have  been  either  divine  or  human;  so  that  the 
discovery  of  a  Jesus  who  was  human  abolishes  the  legend 
of  a  Jesus  who  was  divine.  The  question  is  never  once 
raised  whether,  in  the  sense  of  the  Synoptic  tradition, 
Jesus  might  not  have  been  both  divine  and  human.  If 
that  question  were  raised  and  answered  in  the  affirmative, 
then  the  inconsistency  with  the  Synoptic  tradition  of  the 
statements  alleged  to  be  found  in  the  "pillar-passages" 
would  at  once  vanish,  and  the  whole  argument  founded  on 
it  evaporate.  At  best  it  would  remain  only  a  new  mode 
of  putting  the  common  "Liberal"  procedure  of  setting  over 
against  one  another  the  divine  and  human  traits  ascribed 
to  Jesus  in  the  Gospels  and,  on  the  assumption  that  both 
cannot  be  true,  choosing  the  human  and  rejecting  the  di- 
vine. ^-^  Its  only  advantage  over  the  ordinary  presentation 
of  that  argument  would  be  in  its  concentration  of  the  evi- 
dence of  a  human  Jesus  into  a  few  passages,  set  forth  as 
its  quintessence.  It  could  claim  superior  validity  over 
the  common  "Liberal"  argument  only  if  it  could  be  shown 
that  the  passages  in  which  it  concentrates  the  essence  of 
the  argumeut  for  a  human  Jesus  present  to  our  view  an 
exclusively  human  Jesus,  that  is,  a  Jesus  who  is  in  such 
a  sense  human  that  He  cannot  also  be  divine.  These  mat- 
ters will  require  some  brief  consideration. 

That  the  Jesus  of  the  Evangelists,  while  truly  God  and 
as  such  claiming  our  worship  is  not  exclusively  God,  but 
also  man,  ought  not  in  these  days  to  require  argument  to 
prove.  Certainly  for  those  who  hold  the  position  of 
Schmiedel  with  respect  to  the  origin  and  dating  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  all  motive  for  failure  to  recognize  the 


"•Thus,  for  example,  Johannes  Weiss  (Jesus  von  Nazareth,  pp. 
132-133)  enumerates  first  the  divine  traits  attributed  to  Jesus  in  Mark, 
and  then  the  human  traits— and  concludes  that  the  divine  traits  be- 
long to  the  Jesus  of  legend  and  the  human  to  the  Jesus  of  fact.  See 
The  American  Journal  of  Theology  xv.   (1911),  PP-  553-5- 


258  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

divine-human  character  of  the  Jesus  of  these  Gospels 
would  seem  to  be  removed.  To  say  no  more,  the  Jesus 
of  Paul  is  distinctly  conceived  as  a  divine  person  who  be- 
came man  on  a  mission  of  mercy  for  men/^-^  and  His  true 
humanity  is  as  persistently  presupposed  as  His  deity  it- 
self. H  He  is  in  His  essential  nature  rich,  He  became  poor 
that  by  His  poverty  we  might  become  rich;  if  He  subsists 
in  His  proper  nature  "in  the  form  of  God,"  He  did  not 
consider  His  being  on  an  equality  with  God  so  precious 
but  that  for  the  good  of  men  He  was  willing  to  take  "the 
form  of  a  servant :"  He  was  no  less,  as  concerns  His  flesh, 
of  Israel,  of  the  seed  of  David,  than  He  was  in  His  higher 
nature  "God  over  all,  blessed  for  ever."  And  Paul  does 
not  present  this_  conception  as  a  novelty,  a  peculiarity  of 
His  personal  thought,  an  invention  of  His  own.  He  tells 
us  distinctly,  on  the  contrary,  that  it  was  the  common 
faith  of  the  Christian  communities  among  which  he  moved : 
"for  yc  know,"  says  he,  "the  grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  that  although  He  was  rich,  yet  for  your  sakes  He 
became  poor."  What  reason  is  there  for  doubting  that  it 
was  the  conception  of  the  writers  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels, 
and  is  the  account  to  give  of  their  frank  representation  of 
Jesus  now  as  divine,  and  now  as  human,  with  inextricable 
intermixture  of  the  traits  of  deity  and  humanity?  Con- 
sider only  that  "pillar-passage,"  Mk.  xiii.  32,  which  in  one 
breath  ascribes  to  Him  an  exalted  being  above  all  creatures 
and  ignorance  of  so  simple  a  matter  as  the  time  of  the  oc- 
currence of  an  earthly  event.  In  point  of  fact,  the  his- 
torical tradition  of  Jesus  of  which  the  Synoptic  Gospels 
are  the  bearers,  and  which  stretches  back  of  them  as  far 
into  the  past  as  literary  criticism  enables  us  to  penetrate,  is 
the  tradition  of  an  exclusively  divine  Jesus  as  little  as  it 
is  the  tradition  of  an  exclusively  human  Jesus;  it  is  dis- 
tinctly the  tradition  of  a  divine  Jesus  who  is  living  and 
moving  in  the  flesh.     To  represent  statements  in  this  tra- 

™  Even  B.  W.  Bacon  {Fifth  International  Congress  of  Free  Chris- 
tianity and  Religious  Progress,  1910,  p.  268)  can  speak  briefly  of 
"Paul's  Christology  of  incarnation  and  atonement." 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         259 

clition  which  emphasize  the  humanity  of  Jesus  as  on  that 
account  contradictory  to  its  fundamental  tendency  is  noth- 
ing short  of  absurd.  Only  if  they  could  be  shown  to  ascribe 
to  Jesus  a  clearly  exclusive  humanity  could  they  run  athwart 
the  drift  of  the  tradition  in  which  they  are  embedded. 

We  are  not  forgetting  the  currency  of  the  representa- 
tion that  the  two-natured  Jesus  is  a  contribution  of  Paul's 
to  Christian  thought.  That  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are  "Paul- 
ine" in  their  conception  of  Jesus  scarcely  anybody  doubts 
now-a-days.  But  it  is  still  widely  held  that  they  are  Pauline 
because  their  conception  has  been  moulded  by  Paul,  not,  as 
is  more  nearly  true,  because  Paul  was  moulded  by  the  his- 
torical tradition  of  which  they  are  the  repositories.  In 
point  of  fact,  however,  the  two-natured  Jesus  is  aboriginal 
to  Christian  thought;  and  the  proof  of  this  lies  in  that  very 
failure  of  literary  criticism  to  find  a  tradition  of  a  Jesus 
different  from  its  own  back  of  the  Synoptic  record,  which 
has  provoked  Schmiedel  into  seeking  such  a  tradition  by 
the  more  direct  path  of  immediate  historical  criticism.  The 
assumption  that  has  ruled  "Liberal"  criticism  for  a  gener- 
ation that  between  Paul  and  the  primitive  community  there 
lies  a  deep  gulf  and  again  another  between  the  primitive 
community  and  the  actual  Jesus,  must  give  way  before  this 
fact.  It  is  already  giving  way.  Franz  Dibelius  is  but  voic- 
ing a  growing  better  understanding  of  the  state  of  the 
case  when  he  declares  roundly  that  it  is  quite  unjustified, 
and  altogether  contrary  to  historical  reality,  to  assume,  as 
has  so  long  been  assumed,  "that  there  are  two  deep  clefts  in 
the  history  of  primitive  Christianity,  one  between  Jesus  and 
the  Jerusalem  community,  and  the  other  between  the  primi- 
tive community  and  Paul ;  that  the  theology  of  Paul — Paul- 
inism — is  substantially  dififerent  from  the  theology  of  the 
primitive  community  and  the  theology  of  the  primitive  com- 
munity substantially  different  from  the  faith  of  Jesus ;  that 
our  whole  tradition  as  to  the  life  and  words  of  Jesus  is 
strongly  influenced — 'painted  over' — by  the  conceptions  of 
Christ  of  the  primitive  community  and  of  Paul."^-^    Even 

^  Das  Abendmahl,  1911,  p.  8. 


26o  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

an  Adolf  Harnack  warns  us  that  the  place  of  Paul  in  the 
history  of  Christian  thought  was  not  that  of  a  creator,  and 
that  the  gospel  Paul  preached  was  already  preached  by  the 
primitive  community  and  coalesces  in  substance  with  that 
of  Jesus  Himself ;  so  that  a  crass  contrast  between  what  he 
calls  "the  first"  and  "the  second"  gospels  can  by  no  means 
be  erected. ^^^  It  will  be  observed  that  the  effect  of  this 
revulsion  from  the  current  opposition  of  Paul  and  the 
primitive  community,  or  of  Paul  and  Jesus,  is  not  exhausted 
in  wiping  out  the  difference  between  Paul  and  Jesus  which 
it  has  been  the  custom  to  emphasize;  it  also  wipes  out  the 
difference  between  the  early  community  and  Jesus  which 
it  has  been  equally  the  custom  to  emphasize.  That  is  to 
say,  it  sets  aside  the  canon  on  which  "Liberal"  criticism 
has  been  accustomed  to  act  when  it  has  assigned  a  large 
part  of  the  Gospel  tradition  to  "the  Christian  community," 
whose  faith,  it  has  been  asserted,  has  been  carried  back  into 
the  historical  tradition  and  imposed  on  Jesus.  There  is  no 
evidence,  as  Dibelius  rightly  insists,  that  any  such  process 
took  place,  and,  in  the  absence  of  that  evidence,  we  may 
claim  even  a  Weinel  as  a  witness  to  the  impropriety  of 
assuming  it.  He  is  telling  us  how  the  work  of  criticism 
is  to  be  prosecuted.  Literary  criticism,  he  says,  must  first 
be  carried  to  its  utmost  extent.  Its  business  is  to  make 
clear  what  the  oldest  sources  contain.  After  that  has  been 
ascertained,  historical  criticism  is  to  be  called  in.  Its  busi- 
ness is  to  determine  what  has  been  added  to  the  true  tra- 
dition in  the  course  of  oral  transmission.     He  adds:^^*^ 


'^"Das  doppelte  Evangelium  im  Neuen  Testament"  (1910)  in  Aus 
Wissenschaft  und  Leben,  ii.,  191 1,  p.  216  (E.  T.  in  The  Proceedings  and 
Papers  of  the  Fifth  International  Congress  of  Free  Christianity  and 
Religious  Progress,  191 1,  p.  loi).  Cf.  What  is  Christianity?  E.  T. 
1 901,  pp.  153-4.  Also  H.  Weinel,  1st  das  "liberale"  Jesusbild  miderlegt? 
1910,  pp.  15-16;  "Seven  Oxford  Men,"  Foundations,  1912,  pp.  77,  157. 

^^  Ibid.,  p.  31.  Weinel  presents  here  the  common  "Liberal"  canon 
of  criticism  in  its  most  reasonable  form.  He  rejects  it  in  the  sweep- 
ing positive  form  that  everything  is  to  be  rejected  which  can  be  ex- 
plained from  the  "interests"  of  the  early  Christian  community,  and 
validates  it  only  in  the  narrower  negative  form  that  only  that  is  to  be 
rejected  which  cannot  be  explained  from  an  "interest"  of  Jesus  but  only 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGES"         261 

"For  this,  now,  the  sole  canon  for  distinguishing  the  genuine 
from  the  non-genuine  is  the  principle  that  only  such  traits  of 
the  tradition  are  to  be  excluded  as  not  genuine  which  can  not 
come  from  an  interest  of  Jesus,  but  only  from  an  interest  of 
the   community.     This   principle — as   was   shown    above   against 
Wrede — is  not  to  be  stretched  into  the  different  one  that  where- 
ever  the  community  has  an  interest — where,  however,  no  reason 
forbids   that  Jesus   may   have   also   had    it — the   tradition   is   to 
be  rejected  as  wholly  ungenuine.     Rather — since  here  it  is  al- 
ways a  matter  of  exclusion — proof  must  first  be  adduced  that 
the  interest  in  question  can  have  arisen  only  later." 
As  long,  then,  as  evidence  is  lacking  that  the  conception  of 
Jesus  as  divine  was  the  product  of  the  faith  of  the  com- 
munity, we  are  not  only  justified  in  holding  that  the  claims 
to  a  divine  nature  attributed  to  Jesus  by  the  historical  tra- 
dition are  genuine,  but  we  are  bound  so  to  hold. 

But,  it  may  be  demanded,  is  not,  as  Bousset  phrases  it, 
faith  the  foe  of  fact?^^^  And  are  we  not  justified  in  dis- 
counting the  claims  to  a  divine  nature  placed  on  the  lips  of 


from  an  interest  of  the  community.  In  this  form,  however,  it  remains 
still  unworkable.  It  involves,  indeed,  circular  reasoning:  we  are  to 
determine  what  is  true  of  Jesus  by  omitting  all  that  is  not  true  of  Jesus ; 
and  of  course  we  must  know  what  is  true  of  Jesus  before  we  can  deter- 
mine what  is  not  true  of  Jesus.  We  may  search  the  literature  of  criti- 
cism almost  in  vain  for  workable  formal  canons  of  criticism.  E.  A. 
Abbott  does  indeed  suggest  one  (Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col  1782,  note  2; 
cf.  col.  1788,  note  2  and  Schmiedel's  allusion  to  it,  col.  1872)  in  the  form 
that  "the  presence  of  stumbling-blocks  in  a  narrative  is  proof  of  an  early 
date";  and  this  is  a  canon  which  is  recognized  in  general  by  the 
methodologists  (cf.  E.  A.  Freeman,  The  Methods  of  Historical  Study, 
1886,  pp.  128,  136;  H.  B.  George,  Historical  Evidence,  1909,  p.  165) 
as  analogous  to  the  rule  in  Textual  Criticism  that  "preference  should 
be  given  to  the  difficilior  lectio."  But  this  canon  is  very  plastic  in  its 
application  as  may  be  observed  from  Abbott's  exposition  of  it  on 
the  one  hand,  and  Schmiedel's  reading  of  it  as  equivalent  to  his  canon 
of  contradiction  on  the  other  (cf.  Das  vierte  Evangelium,  etc.,  p.  86  bot- 
tom). Bernheim  (op  cit.,  p.  507)  remarks  on  the  slowness  of  the 
emergence  into  recognition  in  general  historical  science  "of  the  great 
simple  maxims  of  investigation." 

^Was  zvissen  mir  von  Jesus f  1904.  p.  56:  "It  has  been  rightly 
emphasized  that  in  this  regard  our  first  three  Gospels  are  distinguished 
from  the  fourth  only  in  degree.  Must  there  not,  then,  have  taken 
place  here  a  complete  repainting  from  the  standpoint  of  faith?  For 
there  is  a  certain  propriety  in  saying  that  faith  is  the  foe  of  history. 
Where  we  believe  and  honor  we  no  longer  see  objectively." 


262  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

Jesus  by  the  Christian  community,  by  the  mere  fact  that 
this  community  was  a  worshiper  of  Jesus  and  therefore 
predisposed  to  represent  Him  as  making  the  claims  which 
would  justify  that  worship?  This  is,  however,  precisely 
what  we  have  just  seen  Weinel  telling  us  it  is  illegitimate 
to  do.  The  fact  that  the  community  believed  Jesus  to  be 
divine  is  no  proof  that  Jesus  did  not  Himself  also  believe 
that  He  was  divine.  It  must  first  be  proved  (assuming  it, 
is  not  .enough)  that  Jesus  could  not  have  made  a  claim  to 
divinity,  before  the  otherwise  credible  representation  of  the 
community  that  He  did  make  such  a  claim  can  be  set  aside. 
We  must  not  fall  into  the  banality  of  pronouncing  the  testi- 
mony of  earnest  men  to  facts  within  their  knowledge  un- 
trustworthy, just  in  proportion  as  they  have  themselves 
believed  these  facts  and  yielded  themselves  to  their  in- 
fluence. Rather,  their  adherence  to  these  facts,  and  their 
manifest  profound  belief  in  them,  is  the  strongest  testimony 
to  their  actuality  which  they  could  give  us.  So  far  from 
faith  being  the  foe  of  fact,  faith  is  the  correlate  of  fact  and 
its  proper  evidence.  "Faith,"  in  other  words,  as  a  recent 
writer  puts  it,^^^  "did  not  incapacitate  the  evangelists  as 
narrators;  it  showed  them,  rather,  how  infinitely  the  life 
of  Jesus  deserved  narration."  "What  mandate  of  historical 
method,"  exclaims  Johannes  Weiss, ^^^  "tells  us  that  the 
interested  parties  [die  Bctheiligten]  are  to  be  distrusted 
under  all  circumstances?  .  .  .  The  truly  unprejudiced  man 
will  say :  'With  reference  to  the  nature  of  a  personality 
we  shall  always  reach  ultimately  a  clearer  notion  along 
with  these  who  have  surrendered  themselves  to  his  influence 


"*  Hugh  R.  Mackintosh,  The  Doctrine  of  the  Person  of  Jesus  Christ, 
1912,  p.  8.  He  continues  :  "The  impulse  to  select,  to  fling  upon  words 
or  incidents  a  light  answering  to  the  later  situation  of  the  Church,  is 
natural  and  intelligible ;  what  is  not  so  is  an  impulse  to  deform  or  to 
fabricate.  'Fidelity  to  the  historical  tradition',  a  sympathetic  writer 
[it  is  of  E.  F.  Scott,  The  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  2  that  he  is  speaking] 
has  said,  'was  undoubtedly  the  chief  aim  of  the  Synoptic  writers. 
Their  work  may  here  and  there  bear  traces  of  theological  coloring, 
but  their  first  interest  was  the  facts.  Their  part  was  not  to  in- 
terpret, but  simply  to  record.'  " 

'^^^  Jesus  von  Nazareth,  etc.,  iQio,  p.  93. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "PILLAR-PASSAGES"         263 

than  with  those  whom  hate  has  made  blind,  or  who  have 
simply  taken  no  interest  in  him.'  "  The  matter  is  placed  in 
a  fair  light  by  some  remarks  of  W.  Heitmiiller's:^^^ 

"For   all   particular   accounts    we    are    indebted    altogether   to 
Christian  sources,  that  is,  to  sources  which  come  from  followers 
of  Jesus.     It  is  a  sign  of  the  presently  reigning  anxiety   with 
respect  to  the  knowledge  of  Jesus  and  especially  a  proof  of  the 
defective  training  of  the  oppugners  of  Jesus,  that  this   fact  is 
regarded  as  a  ground  of  uneasiness,  and,  on  the  other  side,  as 
a  weapon   to  be  used  against  the   historicity  of  the   Nazarene. 
Who,  on  such  grounds,   doubts  the  historicity  of  Socrates,  be- 
cause we  are  indebted  to  his  votaries   {Verehrern),   Plato  and 
Xenophon,  for  the  chief  accounts  of  him?     And  whence  do  we 
have  any  knowledge  of  Buddha  save  from  the  Buddhist  litera- 
ture ?""= 
In  the  absence  of  all  positive  proof  that  Jesus  was  not 
what  His  followers  represent  Him,  we  must  accept  Him 
as  what  they  represent  Him.     To  refer  subjectively  to  the 
faith  of  His  followers  what  they  refer  objectively  to  His 
person,  for  no  other  reason  than  that  it  would  seem  to  us 
more  natural  that  He  should  have  been  something  differ- 
ent— what  we  choose  to  think  Him  rather  than  what  they 
knew  Him  to  be — is  only  to  be  guilty  ourselves,  in  the  por- 
trait which  we  form  of  Jesus,  in  an  immensely  aggravated 
form,  of  the  fault  of  which  we  accuse  them. 

We  have  allowed  that  Schmiedel's  "pillar-passages" 
might  be  worthy  of  more  consideration  as  evidence  of  a 
contradictory   tradition   underlying   that   which    alone   has 


^  Schiele  und  Zcharnack's  Die  Religion,  etc.,  iii.  1912,  p.  345. 

^^  Cf.  H.  Weinel,  1st  das  "liberale"  Jesus  widerlegt?  1910,  p.  28. 
"The  whole  tradition  about  Jesus  is  Christian, — Mark  too,  even  Well- 
hausen's  'Primitive  Mark,'  has  Christian  traits ;  and  what  is  Chris- 
tian must  be  cleared  away  from  the  portrait  of  Jesus  before  He 
Himself  is  found.  But.  then,  only  what  is  in  a  particular  sense  Chris- 
tian. Jesus  was  certainly  no  Jew,  but  something  new;  what  is  Chris- 
tian is  to  be  warded  off  from  Him  only  so  far  as  it  concerns  thoughts 
and  ideas  and  tendencies  which  only  the  later  comjuunity  could  have." 
The  emphasis  upon  the  word  "only"  here  is  strong;  see  p.  31  (quoted 
above,  p.  260)  and  also  p.  21  when  in  opposition  to  Wrede,  Weinel 
declares:  "We  must  give  credit  to  a  tradition  so  long  as  it  is  not 
clearly  proved  to  be  impossible."  We  must  not  reject  tradition  in 
principle  and  demand  that  historical  facts  be  shown  to  be  necessary, 
before  we  accept  them  as  actual. 


264  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

survived  and  become  embodied  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  if 
the  Jesus  which  they  bring  before  us  was  not  merely  a 
Jesus  who  possessed  truly  human  traits  and  who  sometimes 
would  not  work  miracles,  but  a  Jesus  who  was  merely  a 
human  being  and  was  quite  incapable  of  working  miracles 
in  any  circumstance.  Of  such  an  implication  of  these 
"pillar-passages,"  however,  there  can  be  no  question,  as 
has  already  sufficiently  appeared.  He  in  whom  a  truly 
human  soul  dwelt  (though  in  conjunction  with  the  Divine 
Spirit)  might  well — nay,  needs  must. — have  been  the  sub- 
ject, as  respects  that  soul,  of  ignorances  (Mk.  xiii.  32)  and 
the  sense  of  desolation  in  the  throes  of  mortal  agony  (Mk. 
XV.  34)  ;  and  might  take  a  secondary  place  in  comparison 
with  the  pure  Divine  Spirit  (Mk.  xii.  34).  Refusal  to  work 
miracles  in  given  circumstances  and  on  particular  demands 
cannot  be  held  to  carry  with  it  sheer  inability  to  work  them 
in  all  circumstances  (Mk.  vi.  5;  viii.  12).  Even  in  the  in- 
stances (Mk.  X.  18;  vi.  5)  in  which  a  certain  surface  plausi- 
bility may  attach  to  the  contention  that  a,  less  than  divine 
Jesus  is  implied,  this  plausibility  depends  upon  a  particular 
interpretation  which  does  not  do  justice  to  the  actual  lan- 
guage of  the  passages.  The  chief  interest  which  attaches  to 
Schmiedel's  "pillar-passages"  accordingly  lies  in  the  ex- 
posure which  they  supply  of  the  weakness  of  the  case 
against  the  consistency  of  the  portraiture  of  the  divine 
Jesus  drawn  in  the  Synoptic  narratives.  Innumerable  pas- 
sages may  be  pointed  out  in  which  the  true  humanity  of 
Jesus  is  presupposed  and  illustrated ;  but  when  passages  are 
sought  in  which  the  true  deity  of  Jesus  is  denied  or  ex- 
cluded, they  are  discoverable  with  great  difficulty  and  are 
verifiable  only  at  the  price  of  a  method  of  interpreting  them 
which  does  extreme  violence  to  them. 

Schmiedel  is  not  alone  in  his  failure  to  unearth  such  pas- 
sages. Others  too,  have  sought  for  them  and  have  come  for- 
ward with  as  meager  a  fruitage  of  their  searching  in  their 
hands.  For  example,  H.  J.  Holtzmann  thought  that  he 
could  adduce  a  few  passages — they  are  five  in  all — in  which 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL^S  "PILLAR-PASSAGES"         265 

Jesus  ranked  Himself  in  dignity  of  being  distinctly  below 
the  Divine.  It  may  be  worth  while  to  place  Holtzmann's 
passages  by  the  side  of  Schmiedel's  that  the  weakness  of 
the  general  case  may  become  more  apparent.  What  Holtz- 
mann  is  contending  for,  is  that,  however  high  the  self- 
estimation  may  be  which  is  involved  in  Jesus'  claim  to 
the  Messiaship — a  claim  which  Schmiedel  also  allows  that 
Jesus  certainly  made,  and  against  the  "presumption" 
involved  in  which,  to  call  it  by  no  uglier  name,  he  also 
strives  to  defend  his  Jesus^^^ — He  nevertheless  distinctly 
ranks  Himself  below  the  Divine  in  dignity  and  thus  guards 
Himself  against  the  imputation  of  claiming  "superhuman- 
hood"  (Uebennenschentmn).  The  central  portion  of  his 
argument  runs  as  follows  ■}^'^ 

"Let  the  title  of  Messiah  betoken  the  highest  exaltation  of 
human  self-esteem  (Selbstgefiihl),  there  is  at  least  given  in 
the  unqualified  subordination  of  the  idea  of  the  Messiah  to  the 
supreme  idea  of  God  an  absolutely  sufficient  guarantee  against 
a  self-glorifying  superhumanness.  Immutable  facts  establish 
this,  such  as  that  sins  against  the  Son  of  Man  are  adjudged 
pardonable,  in  contrast  with  sins  against  the  Spirit  of  God 
(Mt.  xii.  32  =  Lk.  xii.  10),  and  that  He  recognizes  as  His 
own  not  those  that  call  on  Him  as  Lord,  but  only  those  that  do 
the  will  of  His  Father  (Mt.  vii.  21-23  =  Lk.  vi.  46,  Mk.  iii.  35 
=Mt.  xii.  so  =  Lk.  viii.  21).^'*     He  even  indeed  declines  to  be 


"•DjV  Person  Jesu,  etc.,  pp.  10-18  (E.  T.  pp.  28-52).  It  was  in  no 
sense  due  to  presumption  (Ueberhebung,  pride),  he  contends,  that 
Jesus  held  Himself  to  be  the  Messiah.  He  reached  that  conception  of 
Himself  only  through  severe  struggles  (p.  16).  Therefore,  though 
in  so  thinking  of  Himself,  He  cannot  be  cleared  of  the  charge  of 
being  a  visionary  (Schwdrmer).  if  this  means  only  that  "He  cherished 
expectations  concerning  Himself  which  go  too  high  and  are  afterwards 
not  realized,"  yet  these  too  exalted  expectations  were  not  the  product 
of  pride  (Selbstilberhebung)  and  He  was  not  a  visionary  in  this 
sense.  "It  certainly  is  a  misfortune  that  the  highest  up  to  which 
Jesus  reached  out  in  order  to  fulfil  His  mission.  His  belief  in  His 
messianic  dignity,  led  also  to  expectations  such  as  these,  which  could 
never  really  be  fulfilled;  but  I  do  not  see  that  any  shadow  is  cast 
by  this  upon  His  character  or  His  purity"  (p.  17  ■  E.  T.  p.  51  )• 

"'  H.  J.  Holtzmann :  Das  messianische  Bewusstsein  Jesu,  igo7,  P-  82. 

"*0n  these  passages,  cf.  Karl  Thieme,  Die  christliche  Demut,  I., 
1906,  p.   137:     "But  with  reference  to  such  judgments  on  such  pas- 


266  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

addressed  as  'Good  Master',  because  this  would  involve  assump- 
tion of  God's  exclusive  property  (Mk.  x.  i8  =  Lk.  xviii.  19).  It  is 
not  His  but  solely  God's  concern  to  dispose  of  dignities  and 
honors  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  (Mk.  x.  41  =  Mt.  xx.  25). 
Jesus  rather  knows  Himself  (Lk.  xxii.  27)  with  each  of  His 
followers  as  a  servant,  and  when  He  enforces  upon  His  dis- 
ciples that  all  true  greatness  which  'avails  with  God  reveals  it- 
self in  service  (Mk.  x.  40-45  =  Mt.  xx.  20-28;  Mt.  xxiii.  11  = 
Lk.  xxii.  20)  this  applies  to  Himself  too.  These  are  declara- 
tions incapable  of  bing  invented  (unerfindbare),  which  sur- 
pass in  eternal  value  all  that  is  eschatological,  in  the  mouth  of 
Him  whom  nevertheless  the  very  next  generation  exalted  to  the 
throne  of  the  Judge  of  the  world  (Mt.  xxv.  31-34)  and  in 
the  end  made  equal  with  God."^'^ 

It  was  not,  however,  the  next  generation  which  "exalted 
Jesus  to  the  throne  of  the  Judge  of  the  world,"  but  Jesus 
Himself;  it  is  involved,  to  go  no  farther,  in  His  favorite 
self-designation  of  Son  of  Man.     Nor  was  it  merely  "in  the 


sages,  the  question  is  to  be  asked  whether  there  are  really  set  over 
against  one  another  here  God  and  Jesus'  ego,  a  demeanor  toward  the 
one  and  a  demeanor  towards  the  other.  What  Jesus  brings  into  op- 
position to  one  another  is  rather  two  kinds  of  demeanor  towards 
Himself  and  His  preaching — the  one,  calling  Him  'Lord,  Lord,'  plead- 
ing rights  of  kinship  with  Him,  giving  Him  extravagant  ad- 
miration, envying  His  mother,  and  so  forth,  and  not  doing  what  He 
commands  (cf.  Lk.  vi.  46)  ;  the  other,  according  obedience  to  the 
word  of  God  with  which  He  comes  forward,  and  doing  what  He 
announces  as  the  will  of  God.  The  general  meaning  of  these  dec- 
larations is  not  that  Jesus  points  in  any  way  away  from  Himself  to 
God,  but  that  He  deprecates  every  manner  of  relation  to  Him  which 
does  not  include  the  doing  of  His  moral  requirements." 

'^  It  is  interesting  to  observe  how  little  advance  has  been  made  on  the 
Arians  in  this  method  of  argument.  Athanasius  (Migne,  Patr.  Graec. 
xxvi.  col.  gSsc)  tells  us  that  in  attempting  to  discover  a  less  than 
divine  Jesus  in  the  Scriptures  they  said :  "How  can  [the  Son]  be  like 
[the  Father]  or  of  the  Father's  essence,  when  it  is  written,  As  the 
Father  has  life  in  Himself,  so  He  has  given  also  to  the  Son  to  have 
life  in  Himself?  There  is,  they  say,  a  superiority  in  the  giver  above  the 
reciever.  And,  Why  callest  thou  me  good?  they  say.  No  one  is  good 
except  one,  God.  And  again,  My  God,  my  God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken 
me?  And  once  more,  Of  the  last  day  no  one  knoweth,  not  even  the 
Son,  except  the  Father.  And  again,  Whom  the  Father  sanctified  and 
sent  into  the  world.  And  again,  Whom  the  Father  raised  from  the 
dead.  How,  then,  they  say,  can  He  that  is  raised  from  the  dead  be 
like  or  of  the  same  nature  with  Him  that  raised  Him?"  This  is 
to  all   intents  and  purposes  Holtzmann  before   Holtzmann. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "pILLAR-PASSAGEs"         267 

end"  that  He  was  made  "equal  with  God :"  Jesus  Himself 
placed  Himself  not  only  "at  the  side  of  God"  in  contradis- 
tinction to  all  creatures,  above  the  angels  of  heaven  them- 
selves (Mk.  xiii.  52,  one  of  Schmiedel's  "pillar-passages"), 
and  asserted  for  Himself  an  interactive  reciprocity  with  God 
in  knowledge  of  one  another,  such  as  implies  His  equality 
with  God  (Mt.  xi.  27,  a  passage  admitted  by  Schmiedel 
to  be  authentic),  but  also  combines  His  own  person 
as  Son  with  the  Father  and  the  Spirit  in  the  One  Name 
which  is  above  every  name  (Mt.  xxviii.  19).  The  difficulty 
with  Holtzmann  as  with  Schmiedel  is  only  that  he  cannot 
think  in  the  terms  of  the  historical  tradition  of  Christianity 
and  is  consumed  by  zeal  to  get  behind  the  tradition  and  im- 
pose his  own  forms  of  thought  on  the  "real"  Jesus.  The 
marks  of  lowliness  of  spirit  which  he  discovers  in  Jesus — 
who,  being  man,  declared  Himself  to  be  meek  and  lowly  in 
heart — seem  to  him  to  be  inconsistent  with  a  claim  for 
Jesus  of  a  Divine  nature  for  no  other  reason  than  that  he 
sets  before  himself  the  irreconcilable  dilemma,  either  Divine 
or  human,  and  never  once  entertains  the  wider  conception 
of  both  Divine  and  human.  And  yet  it  is  really  undeniable 
that  this  is  the  conception  which  rules  the  whole  historical 
tradition  of  Christianity,  underlies  the  narratives  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  as  truly  as  the  reasoning  of  Paul,  and 
provides  the  one  key  which  will  unlock  the  mysteries  of  the 
self-consciousness  of  Jesus  as  depicted  in  the  earliest  tradi- 
tion known  to  us.  To  tear  the  elements  of  this  self-con- 
sciousness apart,  and  assign  fragments  of  it  to  Jesus  and 
other  fragments  to  the  "faith  of  the  community"  on  no 
other  ground  than  that  thus  a  view  of  Jesus  and  of  the  de- 
velopment of  Christian  feeling  and  thinking  about  Jesus  is 
attained  which  falls  better  in  with  the  paradigms  of  our 
preconceived  conceptions  of  what  were  "natural,"  or  even 
of  what  were  possible,  is  utterly  illegitimate  criticism,  in  the 
complete  absence  of  evidence  for  any  such  discrimination  of 
facts  in  the  tradition,  or  for  any  such  development  of  feel- 
ing and  thinking  concerning  Jesus,  as  is  supposed.     We 


268  THE    PRINCETON    THEOLOGICAL    REVIEW 

must  awake  at  last  to  the  understanding  that  the  historical 
tradition  of  Jesus  is  of  a  Divine-human  Jesus  and  that  this 
tradition  is  copious,  constant,  and  to  all  appearance  ab- 
original. To  break  with  this  tradition  is  to  break  with  the 
entire  historical  tradition  of  Jesus,  and  to  cast  ourselves 
adrift  to  form  a  conception  of  the  real  Jesus  purely  a  priori, 
in  accordance  with  our  own  notions  of  the  fit  or  the  pos- 
sible, unaided  by  the  least  scrap  of  historical  evidence. 

But  surely,  it  will  be  exclaimed,  we  must  exclude  the  im- 
possible from  our  conception  of  the  actual  Jesus.  Un- 
doubtedly the  impossible  cannot  have  been  actual.  It  is  a 
reasonable  custom  of  historians  therefore  to  exclude  the 
manifestly  impossible  from  the  constructions  of  the  actual 
which  they  extract  from  the  testimony  before  them;^'*'' 
though  it  is  worthy  of  remark  that  they  recommend  a  wise 
wariness  in  declaring  attested  occurrences  impossible. ^^^  Of 
one  thing  we  may  meanwhile  be  sure, — that  what  was  actual 
can  scarcely  be  impossible ;  and  it  is  not  a  bad  way — among 
others — of  determining  what  is  possible  to  observe  what  is 
actual.  The  testimony  to  the  actual  existence  of  the  super- 
natural Jesus  is  simply  overwhelming.  Shall  we  set  it  all 
aside  on  the  bald  assumption  that  the  supernatural  is  im- 
possible? Two  remarks  fall  to  be  made  here.  The  first  is 
that  Schmiedel  at  least  is  committed  not  to  treat  the  super- 
natural element  in  the  Synoptical  account  of  Jesus  as  a 
priori  impossible.  "It  would  clearly  be  wrong,"  he  says,^^^ 
"in  an  investigation  such  as  the  present,  to  start  from  any 

""  Cf.  Langlois  and  Seignobos,  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  History, 
1898,  p.  206  ff :  H.  B.  George,  Historical  Evidence,  1909,  pp.  136-167. 

^"H.  B.  George,  for  example  wishes  us  to  be  chary  of  rejecting 
all  miraculous  accounts  (though  on  grounds  which  only  go  part  of  the 
way)  and  not  only  enunciates  the  general  proposition  that  "when  a 
statement  is  made  by  a  real  contemporary  it  requires  something 
beyond  mere  intrinsic  improbability  to  lead  us  to  disbelieve  it"  (p.  164), 
but,  with  his  eye  directly  on  miracles,  declares  that  although  when  the 
document  narrating  them  is  of  low  credibility  they  may  be  safely 
neglected,  yet  when  the  general  credibility  of  documents  must  be  rated 
high,  "it  becomes  more  difficult  to  disparage  any  statement  contained 
in  them,  whether  it  is  called  miraculous  or  not"  (p.  169). 

"^^  Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1877. 


CONCERNING  SCHMIEDEL's  "PILLAR-PASSAGEs"         269 

such  postulate  or  axiom  as  that  'miracles'  are  impossible," 
— though,  as  we  have  seen,  if  he  does  not  start  from  this 
postulate  he  soon  calls  it  in  as  the  determining  principle  of 
his  criticism. ^^^  The  second  remark  is  that  the  supernatural 
element  cannot  be  excluded  from  the  life  of  Jesus  except 
on  the  ground  of  its  a  priori  impossibility.  To  all  critical 
efforts  to  exclude  it,  it  proves  absolutely  intractable.  The 
whole  historical  tradition  testifies  to  an  intensely  supernatural 
Jesus.  It  is  only  on  the  ground  of  a  philosophical  presup- 
position that  the  supernatural  is  impossible  that  the  super- 
natural Jesus  can  be  set  aside.  ^^^  But  thus  the  question  as 
to  the  supernatural  Jesus  is  shifted  into  a  region  other  than 
the  historical.  Whether  the  supernatural  is  possible  is  a 
question  not  of  historical  criticism  but  of  philosophical 
world-view.  For  the  present  it  may  be  permitted  to  go  at 
that.  It  is  enough  to  have  made  it  plain  that  if  the  super- 
natural Jesus  is  to  be  displaced  from  history,  it  is  not  on 
historical  grounds  that  He  can  be  displaced. 


^'^Encyclopaedia  Biblica,  col.  1878:  "Lk.  xxiii.  44  expressly,  and  Mk. 
XV.  S3,  Mt.  xxvii.  45  also  to  all  appearance,  allege  an  eclipse  of  the  sun, 
a  celestial  phenomenon  which,  however,  is  possible  only  at  the  period 
of  New  Moon, — i.e.,  shortly  before  the  ist  of  Nisan — and  cannot 
happen  on  the  iSth  or  14th  of  a  month",  that  is  to  say  the  phenomenon 
of  the  darkening  of  the  sun  cannot  have  happened  unless  it  happened 
naturally.     Cf,   above,   note    13. 

"*"For,"  says  Strauss  (second  Life  of  Jesus.  I.  p.  19),  "if  the 
Gospels  are  really  and  truly  historical,  it  is  not  possible  to  exclude 
miracles  from  the  Life  of  Jesus;  if,  on  the  other  hand,  miracles 
are  incompatible  with  history,  then  the  Gospels  are  not  really  historical 
records." 

/ 

Princeton.  Benjamin  B.  Warfield. 


REVIEWS     OF 
RECENT     LITERATURE 


PHILOSOPHICAL  LITERATURE 

W  First  Book  in  Metaphysics.  By  Walter  T.  Marvin,  Collegiate  Pro- 
fessor of  Logic  and  Mental  Philosophy  in  Rutgers  College.  New 
York:  The  Macmillan  Company.  1912.  8vo;  pp.  xiv,  271.  $1.50 
net. 

In  writing  this  book  the  author  has  had  in  mind  to  fulfil  the  follow- 
ing three  purposes :  "First,  he  wished  the  book  to  be  simple,  clear 
and  definite,  and  as  brief  as  possible  in  order  that  the  student  using 
it  might  devote  by  far  the  larger  part  of  his  time  to  further  reading." 
"Secondly,  he  wished  to  write,  not  air  outline  of  the  historical  devel- 
opment of  the  problems  of  metaphysics,  nor  a  long  discussion  regarding 
the  definition  and  division  of  philosophy,  nor  again  an  account  of 
rival  philosophical  schools  and  their  theories,  but  a  book  in  metaphysics, 
a  book  representing  consistently  one  contemporary  philosophical  ten- 
dency." "Lastly,  he  wished  to  adapt  the  book  especially  to  the  Oxford 
or  preceptorial  method  of  instruction." 

These  three  aims  have  been  realized.  Professor  Marvin's  work  is  a 
model  of  clear,  concise  and  interesting  statement.  It  demonstrates  that 
even  the  metaphysician  can  speak  in  the  language  of  the  people.  Again, 
he  has  given  us,  not  a  history  of  metaphysics,  but  a  consistent  presen- 
tation of  neo-realism ;  and  in  this  we  think  that  he  has  done  most 
wisely.  "The  beginner  demands,  and  has  the  right  to  demand,  a  modern 
philosophical  creed."  In  the  opinion  of  the  reviewer,  nothing  has 
done  more  to  bring  metaphysics  and  even  philosophy  in  general  into 
disrepute  than  the  fact  that  in  modern  times  they  have  come  to  be  dis- 
cussed as  though  the  writer  had  no  creed  of  his  own  and  did  not  deem 
It  important  that  any  one  else  should  have  one.  Nor  has  the  author 
failed  to  adapt  his  book  to  the  Oxford  or  preceptorial  method  of  in- 
struction. He  has  almost  given  a  convincing  object  lesson  of  what 
this  method  of  instruction  is.  The  classified  and  graded  references 
for  private  reading  on  the  part  of  the  pupil  are  invaluable.  They  not 
only  show  him  what  to  read,  but  they  suggest,  and  even  constrain,  that 
free  discussion  with  a  competent  instructor  which  is  the  distinctive 
feature  of  the  Oxford  method.  Would  that  we  had  enjoyed  it  in  our 
college  days ! 

As  to  neo-realism  and  its  claim  to  be  the  true  metaphysic,  the  re- 
viewer, because  a  layman  in  philosophy,  asks  for  more  light  and  more 
time.  Accustomed  to  ground  his  thinking  on  the  natural-realism  of 
Dr.  McCosh,  there  is  not  a  little  that  seems  at  least  strange  to  him 
in  neo-realism.  With  its  purpose  to  learn  from  science  and  to  be  true 
to  fact  he  is,  of  course,  in   fullest  sympathy,  and  he  believes  that  in 


I 


Gaylord  Bros. 

Makers 
Syracuse,  N.  Y. 

PAT.  JAN.  21,  199S 


Date  Due 


